BLM advances solar project that will harm bighorn sheephttps://www.hcn.org/articles/blm-advances-solar-project-that-will-harm-bighorn-sheep
The Bechtel Corporation's Soda Mountain solar farm will undo decades of conservation in California.Dennis Schramm has long looked forward to a time when it might be possible to build a land bridge for bighorn sheep over the Interstate 15 freeway in the Soda Mountains, on the edge of California's Mojave National Preserve. A former National Park Service superintendent at the preserve, Schramm knows how well such crossings work: Three bypasses built in 2011 over U.S. 93 in Arizona have already become sheep highways. A similar bridge over the I-15 could allow desert bighorn trapped on the south side of the freeway to head north into the Avawatz Mountains and from there to Death Valley National Park, where they could mix up their DNA with a fresh new herd.

Sheep won't jump the freeway's barrier fences, says Schramm, so right now “they come down the mountain and stand there, looking at the fence." Noted sheep biologist John Wehausen, who called this place “the most important restorable corridor” for sheep in the Mojave, “looked at the trail and determined that the sheep had used it for thousands of years before I-15 was built,” Schramm says. The sheep “know they should be able to cross.”

Desert bighorn sheep. Photo by David Lamfrom.

One might have thought, then, that Schramm would be happy to hear that the Bureau of Land Management’s recommended plan for a large-scale solar farm in the Soda Mountains, revealed last Friday, took a chunk out of the developer’s proposed design, right at the place where the sheep overpass might go. “Preserving potential future bighorn sheep connectivity was part of our rationale,” says BLM spokesperson Dana Wilson, for eliminating an array of panels on the north side of the I-15, reducing the project by 575 acres, to 1,647 acres of public land. The change drives the project’s capacity down by about 100 megawatts, but by official calculations, it's still enough to power 79,000 homes.

Unfortunately, Schramm has not been appeased. Because it’s not the overpass that’s at issue in this decade, or even the next. As valuable as it would be, no one expects a land bridge for the Soda Mountain bighorn sheep to become reality any time soon. It would cost right around $30 million, and no one has a clue where that kind of money would come from.

Meanwhile, a much more practical effort to get the sheep to cross the I-15, by luring them along washes that run under the freeway — a project for which the National Park Service has already earmarked funds — would still be completely blocked by the solar project, even at its reduced size. Sheep don’t currently use the washes, because they don't like to go under things, which is why the BLM didn't consider them significant in their analysis. But NPS biologists think they can entice sheep to use the underpasses with irresistible survival resources like fresh water. The proposed solar development, wedged as it is between the freeway and the mountains, would sit right in the animals' way.

“They’re conserving one little corridor for an overpass project far in the future,” Schramm says, "but they're precluding any opportunity for the sheep to cross in the immediate present. It’s a short-sighted political decision.”

The Soda Mountains solar project was first proposed in 2008 by an East Coast company, Caithness Energy. It stalled out, reportedly over wildlife controversies (the project will also destroy habitat for the threatened desert tortoise and, by pumping groundwater, will imperil the endangered Mohave tui chub, which hangs on in the nearby Soda Springs). The Bechtel Corporation bought the project a few years later, reigniting a fight environmental groups thought was over. The BLM insists the actual project site doesn’t trample on bighorn habitat, but herds have been known to move through the area along Zyzzyx Road, which runs up against the proposed site southeast from the I-15. Ed LaRue, a biologist who represents the Desert Tortoise Council, recently walked Zyzzx Road and filmed a herd of 17 bighorn, crossing a rocky slope just a half mile from where the panels would go.

And those sheep — their very presence, their health, their mobility — are “one of the great conservation success stories of the last 50 years,” says David Lamfrom, the desert program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association. Desert conservation efforts from Federal Land Management Policy Act of 1976 to the California Desert Protection Act of 1994 cleared the way for iconic species like bighorn to return to places where they’d died off or disappeared. The Soda Mountains sheep “made the 15-mile journey from Afton Canyon in the Cady Mountains to the Soda Mountains,” Lamfrom says, “and recolonized that part of the Mojave National Preserve where sheep had been absent for a very long time.

“We haven’t told this success story enough,” Lamfrom says. “It wasn’t people that moved the sheep. A naturally occurring population recolonized their historic range. The sheep moved themselves, because people created the space for them to do that.”

If they hadn’t, the $30 million land bridge wouldn’t be even up for discussion. It was that migration out of the Cady Mountains that put the sheep in a place where they could even consider crossing the freeway.

The BLM justifies the project's harm to wildlife by arguing it will offset greenhouse gas emissions from fossil-fueled energy production. The agency also regards the Soda Mountain site as a lesser evil, a place its biologists consider "disturbed" with the freeway and its fences, as well as transmission lines that run along Zyzzyx Road.

But what’s disturbed by human reckoning is not necessarily out of reach for wildlife. The Soda Mountains area is "arguably one of the most conserved areas in the country,” Lamfrom says. “It’s between two of the three largest national park units in the lower 48. Do we really want to undo all the good we’ve done?”

To Dennis Schramm, the answer is no. The Soda Mountains area isn't in any of the official Solar Energy Zones the BLM settled on in 2012, nor is it within the other 770,000 acres the agency considers potentially good for solar. It hasn't been designated as prime energy-development turf in the draft Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, a statewide proposal to resolve conservation and renewable energy development conflicts.

“So move it,” Schramm says. “The BLM has said that, in their opinion, there are about a million acres of land where solar could go. So pick another couple of thousand somewhere else.”

Judith Lewis Mernit is a contributing editor at High Country News based in Southern California.

]]>No publisherWildlifeBureau of Land ManagementSolar EnergyRenewable EnergyDesertCaliforniaEndangered SpeciesDeserts2015/06/10 11:10:00 GMT-6ArticleThe Los Angeles wetland warshttps://www.hcn.org/issues/47.8/the-los-angeles-wetland-wars
Environmentalists saved a wetland from developers a decade ago. Now they’re trying to save it from each other.Van de Hoek last risked arrest for native plant life in 2006, when he began pulling alien vegetation from the 600-acre Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve on the Southern California coast, near his home. The City of Los Angeles charged him with vandalism, but later absolved him on the condition that van de Hoek, a gifted interpreter of nature, provide them with scientific reports and lead wetland tours.

These days, at 58, van de Hoek is an environmental educator with Los Angeles County Parks and Recreation and a reformed man. One afternoon, as I stood with him and his fiancée, environmental activist Marcia Hanscom, counting monarchs in a eucalyptus grove on the southern fringe of the Ballona Reserve, he told me the story of his conversion. How, after a squabble with a neighbor over his girdling of a local ficus tree, he noticed native waders, like night herons and egrets, roosting in the ficus trees. How he recognized that ice plant, a South African succulent, shelters native voles and frogs. How he started reading Robert Michael Pyle.

Pyle traveled more than 9,000 miles following the monarch migration across the West for his 1999 book, Chasing Monarchs. Van de Hoek felt a deep kinship with him. “The way he carries books in his car about natural history, the way he drops everything to chase a butterfly,” van de Hoek says. “I wanted to call him up!” Monarchs, Pyle observed, roost in eucalyptus in the absence of their native conifers. He was angry that state land managers were cutting the “eucs” down. “He was angry at me,” van de Hoek said, pressing binoculars to his face to count the fluttering masses above our heads, clinging there like rust-colored petals.

Slowly, van de Hoek began to see certain urban ecosystems, like the Ballona Wetlands, not as places in need of a heavy-handed fix, but as places in the process of evolving — not back to what they were before humans arrived, but into something just as wild, beautiful and ecologically significant.

A great blue heron and great egrets in a tidal channel in the Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve, Playa del Rey, California.

Jonathan Coffin/Stonebird, CC via Flickr

Van de Hoek’s philosophical transformation means he no longer goes around girdling trees. It has, however, thrown him into a bitter new dispute over the Ballona reserve’s future. Officials with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the state Coastal Conservancy, allied with local nonprofits, have declared in notices of intent, blogs and an elegant website, BallonaRestoration.org, that the Ballona State Ecological Reserve needs to be restored. They want to tear out the ice plant and replace it with native marsh grasses. They want to bulldoze away old construction waste and tear down the levees that contain Ballona Creek, which cuts through the wetlands on its way to the ocean. They want to redesign the straightened creek so it meanders through the wetlands, mimicking a more natural stream.

Some local ecologists disagree with the state’s specific plans, but still believe a restoration is in order. Hanscom, van de Hoek and their allies, however — who include local Sierra Club leaders, politicians and even some journalists — believe almost anything but the most gentle rehabilitation, conducted by hand, would be a disaster. As they await the state’s long delayed environmental impact report for the restoration, they show up at county supervisor meetings, comment on blogs, and write letters to editors. If the restoration goes ahead, Hanscom told me, sweeping her hand over a carpet of green, less native than non, “everything that lives here now will die.”

Why every discussion about the Ballona Wetlands divides environmentalists into camps so entrenched they can barely talk to one another is a question that stumps even some of the people involved in the fight. Wetlands matter, yes — they protect inland settlements from storms, offer habitat to birds, rodents and even coyotes. They treat inland runoff before it enters the ocean. They contain plants that exist nowhere else in the world. Southern California has lost 90 percent of its original 49,000 acres of coastal wetlands. For Los Angeles, Ballona is the very last patch.

But Ballona’s significance goes beyond that. It’s as if, in the concrete sprawl of the L.A. metropolis, where almost every view is owned and where fistfights erupt over beach access, any swath of undeveloped land takes on outsized significance. It becomes a place to project all of our hopes for healing the climate and saving imperiled species, and perhaps even wresting power back from bureaucracy and developers.

This, right now, is the burden of Ballona, a landscape caught between competing visions of what is good, desirable and even natural in urban wildlands. If restoration ecology, as British scientist A.D. Bradshaw declared in the 1980s, is the “acid test of the ecological movement,” then Ballona is the acid test of the acid test — a place that might prove what restoration can, and perhaps should, achieve in an increasingly urbanized West.

Roy van de Hoek and Marcia Hanscom are advocates of a minimal restoration of the Ballona Wetlands.

Jonathan Alcorn

The little eucalyptus grove where van de Hoek counted butterflies — 218 of them — once belonged to a 2,000-acre system of seeps, sand dunes, willow groves, mud flats, lagoon and marsh called Ballona (pronounced Bye-ona). The Tongva people fished and farmed here before early Spanish colonists forced them inland to build missions. Early-19th century Mexican ranchers grazed their cattle on marsh grasses. Later, oil extractors lined the beaches with derricks.

Then came the influx of post-war residents looking for homes near the sea. Howard Hughes bought up much of Ballona in the 1940s for his own personal airport; in the 1960s, parts of the wetland were carved out to create Marina del Rey, a recreational boat harbor surrounded by upscale shopping and high-rise apartments. After Hughes died in 1976, his heirs laid plans to transform what remained of the property into a 1,000-acre housing and retail development called Playa Vista, but a local resident, Ruth Lansford, mobilized to stop them, founding the first activist group to defend the area, Friends of Ballona Wetlands. In so doing, she launched one of the signal battles of the Los Angeles environmental movement.

In 1990, Lansford entered into an agreement with a new group of developers, who promised to preserve 297 acres of wetland in exchange for the Friends dropping their decades-old lawsuit against the development. That was never enough for Marcia Hanscom, who in 1995 founded the Wetlands Action Network to organize Playa Vista resistance. That same year, Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen announced plans to locate their DreamWorks movie studio in Playa Vista, and the fight for Ballona became a blockbuster media event.

Celebrities led marches on the wetlands’ behalf; one activist staged a hunger strike. Hanscom, then in her 40s, found herself organizing wetland tours for journalists from Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. People who spent most of their time in dark theaters rode around on school buses learning about the lifecycle of the tidewater goby, a tiny fish gone from Ballona but native to California lagoons. They learned why the bright yellow mustard flowers blooming in the wetlands didn’t belong, and why the ragged salt grass did. They learned that sloughs and marshes and springs once extended for 20 miles inland from the Southern California coast, and that Conservation International had, in 1996, identified the California Floristic Province from Tijuana, Mexico, to southern Oregon as one of 35 “biodiversity hotspots,” rich with species found nowhere else on Earth.

Eventually, the DreamWorks partners pulled out, but Hanscom had already leveraged the spotlight they’d flicked on. Under the banner, “Citizens United to Save All of Ballona,” she brought together more than 100 activist groups in pursuit of a sweeter deal. They didn’t stop Playa Vista — its apartments and shops and parks now loom over the wetlands like an enemy compound — but they did get the state Coastal Conservancy to purchase another 192 acres from the developer. In 2003, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife bundled it up with the acreage Lansford had secured, and designated it all an ecological reserve. Playa Vista turned another 36 acres just outside the reserve’s southeastern edge into a freshwater marsh to treat the development’s runoff. In 2005, Hughes’ heirs gave the state another 70 acres to settle a tax debt, and the modern boundaries of the reserve were set.

Salt flats in the Ballona Wetlands butt up against Marina Del Rey, California.

Jonathan Alcorn

Little has been done around the wetlands since then. The “Friends,” as they’re known, conduct tours and do restoration whenever possible. Hanscom and van de Hoek, who in 2005 founded the nonprofit Ballona Institute, aren’t allowed any official access and have uneasy dealings with everyone who does. The public has been officially shut out. In 2013, the Annenberg Foundation donated funds for a full-time land manager, and the state hired an ecologist, Richard Brody, the first in the preserve’s history. The Annenberg money ran out last year, and California Fish and Wildlife now struggles to fund Brody’s job. The Annenberg group also at one point made a bid to build an interpretative center on Ballona property that would have included a veterinary facility for stray cats and dogs. Amid intense opposition, last December the foundation backed out.

There’s no getting around the reality that Ballona now suffers from the kind of entropy that sets in when any urban wildland has been left alone too long. Brody says he and his crew pulled out 15 tons of debris last year alone. “Needles, stolen luggage, trash,” he says, much of it left behind by homeless people who use the preserve for campouts, constructing fire pits and setting up tents. Though fences surround parts of the reserve, labeled with signs warning “No Trespassing” and “No Dogs Allowed,” people let their dogs run loose and trample the vulnerable, low-to-the-ground nests of thestate-endangered Belding’s savannah sparrow. Fountains of pampas grass blight the landscape with their feathery excess. Feral cats breed and roam and kill.

“We can’t look at this and say this is a natural system, everything’s fine and healthy,” says Karina Johnston, director of watershed programs for the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Foundation, an independent nonprofit that supports the work of the state-run Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission. Nor can the necessary overhaul be accomplished with volunteer labor on weekends. “Over 3 million cubic yards of sediment have been dumped there,” Johnston says bluntly. “It didn’t get there with wheelbarrows.”

In 2012, the Bay Commission solicited a historical ecology study of Ballona to figure out what the wetlands looked like during a period from 1850 to 1890. The idea was to inform a restoration with evidence from the past. But even the study’s authors, Johnston says, disagree on its implications for restoration. An urban ecological reserve in a city of 5 million people is in some ways beyond redemption. Everything around it has been altered; it can’t be returned to exactly what it was. So how close should a restoration try to get?

Travis Longcore, an associate professor of spatial sciences at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, with a map he and a team created showing the historical geology of the Ballona Wetlands.

Jonathan Alcorn

Like so many modern ecological movements, the one that informs the Ballona restoration began with Aldo Leopold. In 1935, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Leopold led a crew in replanting native tallgrass prairie on exhausted farmland, an installation that later became the centerpiece of the school’s renowned arboretum. Fifty years later, two professors at the university, John Aber and William Jordan, formalized what they called “restoration ecology” as a field of study and practice. Aber saw it as a middle ground between exploitation and preservation, a way of acknowledging that humans can, if they put their collective will toward it, benefit nature.

Aber and Jordan were clear that the goal of restoration was to bring back the native plants and animals that inhabited an area before humans mucked it up.Even then, that wasn’t easy: Leopold himself had come to understand that you can’t bring back tallgrass prairie without the disturbances it evolved with, such as fire to kill woody plants that out-compete grasses. Well-intentioned replantings can also be brought down by the wrong vegetation mix: In 1975, a dune restoration near the Los Angeles International Airport, just down the street from Ballona, was stabilized with “native” plants that ended up encouraging insects whose competition nearly wiped out the El Segundo blue butterfly. The plants were native to Southern California, but not to the dune habitat where the butterfly had thrived.

Then there’s the question of time: What point in the past should a restoration try to re-create? In 2005, the National Park Service and The Nature Conservancy began a violent restoration of Santa Cruz Island, off the Southern California coast, slaughtering feral pigs, burning tall fennel stands and relocating golden eagles, who had moved into the predator void left by DDT-ravaged bald eagles. The goal of the restoration was to return the island to what it was before 19th century ranchers colonized it. It was done primarily to save the endangered island fox.

That restoration has been a success, on its terms; since it was completed in 2007, the little fox has rebounded. But recent archaeological evidence suggests the fox might not be so indigenous. Thousands of years ago, gray foxes were brought to the islands by the Chumash Indians, who cherished them as companions; one theory suggests the island fox evolved from those animals. Whether that matters to you depends on which point in time you pick to consider the island “natural.”

At Ballona, it’s not just thousands of years of human influence that have made settling on a restoration epoch tricky. Earthquakes and weather, too, have altered the system through the years. Before 1825, the Los Angeles River emptied into the ocean at Ballona, and, with its relatively strong hydrologic force, kept the wetlands open to the tides. But after a series of seismic shocks and floods shoved the river’s course south, only little Ballona Creek trickled down from the inland watershed, most years lacking the force to breach the dunes and let saltwater in. The creek petered out into the estuary, feeding a freshwater marsh.

In the late 1930s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers lined the banks of Ballona Creek with concrete to protect the communities around it from flooding. Where the creek emptied into the ocean, now with enough directed force to keep a channel open again, the Corps built concrete levees to keep those tides away from land.

A walking path traverses the fenced Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve, hard against the Playa Vista development in Los Angeles.

Jonathan Alcorn

Right now, the Ballona Wetlands contain a mixture of ecologies replenished meagerly by urban runoff, winter rains and minimal tides through a single gate. Whether any restoration should, or even can, return them to their mostly freshwater 19th century condition is a matter of much agitated debate. The state’s preferred plan would lower parts of the reserve to sea level and demolish the levees, allowing the tides to flow in and create more saltwater marsh. But that, says Travis Longcore, an associate professor of spatial sciences at the University of Southern California and an authority in ecological restoration, is “the wrong big move.” Those levees, he says, mimic a lost feature of the wetland as it evolved since 1825.

“The levees now function like an outer dune system,” Longcore explains, keeping the tides at bay. If you’re restoring the Ballona Wetlands for the sake of the species that historically depended on it, minimizing the influx of saltwater matters.

Unlike Hanscom and van de Hoek, Longcore isn’t completely opposed to a Ballona restoration. “I think there are smart things you could do with Ballona that would make it better ecologically, and function better for rare species that we care about,” he says. “Some of them do require bulldozers.” One would involve raising Culver Boulevard, a major street that bisects the wetlands. The wetlands could flow under the elevated road, connecting the north and south segments. Wildlife could then move freely under the road instead of ending up as roadkill. Culver Boulevard is also the official tsunami escape route, so raising it would be good for public safety, as well as a hedge against climate-influenced sea-level rise.

But Longcore, who is president of Los Angeles Audubon, also wants any restoration of Ballona to protect its current population of birds and animals. And that goal, he says, is often at odds with the state plan, which he believes imposes a simple, ostensibly low-maintenance ideal he calls “flush, baby, flush” on a complex and diverse ecology. That plan will have dire consequences for the habitat of certain species, like the federally endangered California gnatcatcher, a tiny bird recently spotted in Ballona’s coastal scrub for the first time since 1880. The burrowing owl would also lose ground were seawater to flood its habitat, and more would be destroyed, at least temporarily, when fill from the excavation of a tidal basin gets dumped on upland habitat.

To underscore his argument, Longcore brings up another restoration, completed two years ago, 20 miles up the coast from Ballona, at Malibu Lagoon. Most local environmentalists consider the restoration — done chiefly for the sake of water quality — an unqualified success.The restoration did not open the lagoon to the ocean, as would the removal of Ballona Creek’s levees, but it did create much more open water than existed there before, replacing an algae-clouded marsh with a clean, open lagoon. Biologists have reported that the populations of certain endemic fish, like the tidewater goby, are on the rise.

And yet Longcore believes that the restoration got it wrong. “Of course, there are tidewater gobies there,” he says heatedly. “There were tidewater gobies there before.” It’s the other creatures that the $7 million state-run collaboration ran roughshod over that trouble him, animals like the south coast marsh vole. The vole, a state species of “special concern,” also exists at Ballona; it occupies a wet, meadowy area, says Longcore, above the tidal zone. Before the restoration, Malibu Lagoon had a lot of habitat for the vole, which needs room to escape the incoming tides. The construction of the new estuary dredged and bulldozed most of it away to make way for more open water.

“So if you ask, ‘Was the Malibu Lagoon project a successful restoration for the south coast marsh vole?’ ” Longcore says, “the answer would be no. They removed a lot of individuals. I don’t know where they put them. Some specimens came to the natural history museum to be, you know, specimens.”

Snowy egret in the slough of the Ballona Wetlands.

Jonathan Coffin/Stonebird, CC via Flickr

Trash in the Ballona Wetlands reserve.

Jonathan Coffin/Stonebird, CC via Flickr

I talked to Longcore in his basement office on campus, on a brisk, showery day in December. At 45, he is tall and energetic, with a fountain of short dark hair. He talks with his entire being, even while sitting in his chair. He is a consummate scholar: He has examined old surveyor accounts and 19th century coastal maps, and claims to have read every L.A. Times story that mentions Ballona. He has contributed to several historical ecology reports on California’s coastal wetlands, including the one on Ballona curated by the Bay Commission. And he argues that Southern California is moving in the wrong direction when it comes to restoring coastal wetlands.

“We’ve had a San Francisco Bay model of wetland restoration cookie-cuttered onto almost all of our lagoon restorations here in Southern California,” Longcore says. That model favors big, open bays and lagoons. A 1997 restoration of Batiquitos Lagoon on the North San Diego County coast jettied the mouth permanently open to the ocean; another wetland, Bolsa Chica, 30 miles down the coast from Ballona, was reconfigured nine years ago with a fully tidal lagoon. Longcore argues that such projects are not restorations, because they create permanent tidal openings where only ephemeral openings were found in the past. Instead, like Ballona, both Batiquitos and Bolsa Chica were blocked from the tides by sand bars and sediment, except when a major winter storm briefly blasted a tidal inlet clear.

Longcore shows me a color-coded map of the North San Diego County coast in the 19th century. The pink on the map represents “seasonally flooded salt flat,” he says. Salt flats are dry most of the spring and summer, wet when rain falls or storms blow in. “And the reason they matter ecologically,” says Longcore, “is that they provide seasonal habitat with different depths of water for all kinds of migratory birds: short shorebirds, tall shorebirds, dabbling ducks, diving ducks.” Ninety-five percent of the North County salt flats are gone. Meanwhile, open water in the area’s coastal wetlands has increased by 600 percent.

Wetland habitat “is hard for people to get their minds around,” Longcore says. “It’s neither fish nor fowl. You can drive a car across it sometimes; it’s covered with water otherwise. People have a hard time designing for it,” and the public has a hard time appreciating it. “You hear people say, ‘Oh look! There’s now an octopus in Bolsa Chica! Isn’t this great? We have diversity!’ But no, octopus do not belong in Bolsa Chica.” Sea slugs, adapted to opening and closing systems, do.

Longcore knows it’s a lot easier to love blue water than to embrace the messy, tattered, sometimes brown, sometimes mucky, salt flats. Even Longcore’s wife thinks he’s weak on messaging. “She says, ‘Look, if your argument is, ‘This stuff that looks ugly to people is good,’ you’re going to lose. Because politicians aren’t going to spend the time to sit down and understand the history of coastal wetlands. As long as there’s no homeless and no trash, and there’s blue water to look at and it’s green, they’re going to be happy.’ All they want to know is, ‘Is this going to be pretty?’ ”

It was pouring rain the December day I met Shelley Luce for lunch at a French restaurant in Culver City, a few miles inland from the wetlands — a place once so verdant with riparian beauty that producers in the 1920s built studios here to shoot scenes of pioneers fording Ballona Creek. It was the kind of day that makes people like Luce, an environmental scientist, dream of freeing the city’s streams from their confines, returning the region to its secret hydrological roots, when the Southern California landscape ran wet with creeks and sloughs.

Luce loves the old survey maps of this once-wet city as much as Longcore does. But historical ecology is “only a snapshot,” she says, and she doesn’t believe the wetlands have to be returned to what they were in 1850 for a restoration to be meaningful. And anyway, it can’t be done: The riverine forces that once shaped the Ballona Valley, transporting rocks and sediment from the mountains through the watershed, no longer exist in the paved-over city. Now there are “gas lines and airports and private property,” Luce says. “We have to consider what’s possible.”

Luce is 44, willowy and calm, and an influential coalition builder. She was a major player on the Ballona restoration until recently, when she left her post as director of the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission to serve as executive director for the nonprofit Environment Now. She still participates in the discussion, publishing a newsletter called Access Ballona and sitting on advisory committees. And she’s still the scientist who makes the best case for the state’s restoration plans.

Luce doesn’t dispute Longcore’s description of Ballona as closed to the tides. “It looks from the historical ecology that there was more freshwater than (salt marsh) at times,” she says. Still, she wants those levees to come out, in part so that Ballona can join the citywide re-wilding effort revolving around the Los Angeles River, where the Army Corps last May approved a $1 billion project to demolish 11 miles of the river’s 75-year-old concrete banks.

But she also wants the levees out because she wants the wetlands to be wet again, as they were back when free-flowing freshwater creeks and streams and occasional tides refreshed them. For the creeks to water the wetlands again, they would have to be released from their concrete culverts, and floodplains would have to be cleared of homes, offices and shopping malls. “That’s not going to happen in my lifetime,” Luce says. So let Ballona be what it can be: A self-sustaining, mostly tidal marsh. Saltwater marsh is habitat, too, and supporters of the restoration believe that certain species, like the endangered California least tern and the clapper rail, might rebound in the project’s wake.

Stilts on the Ballona Creek Estuary.

Jonathan Coffin/Stonebird, CC via Flickr

British restoration pioneer Bradshaw once described the American approach to restoration as: “If you can’t put it back like it was … then don’t do it!” But that, he wrote, is “a counsel of perfection leading only to despair.” If a landscape has been altered beyond redemption, he said, it’s OK to find another model for it — one that fits the local community, meshes with the local ecology, and accommodates the modern era and its inhabitants.

That’s exactly what Luce believes the state’s plan does. “We might create more saltwater marsh in Ballona than was there in 1850,” she admits. “It might be closer to the way things looked in 1650. We don’t know.” Either way, she says, there’s a net gain for coastal wetlands. “We’ve lost a lot of salt marsh up and down the coast, too,” Luce says, though only a handful of those areas were ever fully open to the ocean. “We have an opportunity to get one or the other back at Ballona, and both are good. The salt marsh option just means we’ll have something that might be more sustainable over time.”

Longcore disagrees. If Ballona is opened to the tides, it will need periodic expensive dredging to stay that way, because sediment happens. And beyond what an expanded salt marsh would do to displace existing habitat, he worries about what will happen to the resident animals during construction.

Luce admits some will die, even if you take great care not to kill them. “None of us like it,” she says. “But we’re doing it because two years later, the whole place will come back 10 times better.”

There’s no guarantee of that, of course. Bradshaw considered restoration the best test of ecologists’ understanding of nature, but he knew back then that their understanding of nature wasn’t perfect. It isn’t now, either. Any restoration is to some extent a risk: No one knows for sure whether any altered landscape or its biodiversity will come back better, worse, or simply different.

A Harlan’s red-tailed hawk, wintering in the Ballona Wetlands, with the Hollywood sign, 13 miles away, in the background.

Jonathan Coffin/Stonebird, CC via Flickr

Roy van de Hoek no longer gives tours of the Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve. In 2008, he got into a dustup with Brody, then a biological consultant for state Fish and Wildlife, who had covered a segment of the wetland with a tarp to smother alien vegetation without herbicides. The goal was to restore native milk vetch, which had been wiped out in the wetlands in the 1950s. Van de Hoek objected — too vehemently — that the tarp would also kill squirrels, voles and Pacific chorus frogs. He was subsequently banned from the reserve.

So it was without his and Hanscom’s company that I trespassed into the reserve myself, around sunset one Sunday afternoon, walking around behind a pocket park where only wooden stumps and signs warned me away.

Lizards skittered under my feet, and ducks landed out on a bare circle of sand known as the “horse-riding ring,” because at one point, that’s what it was. I took a deep breath and inhaled the bright, green breeze, thick with sea and flora. I walked among tendrils of California salt grass and stands of pickleweed, plants whose names I knew mostly because van de Hoek taught me to revere them a decade ago, back when he believed they were sacred, and told me to kneel upon the ground in their presence.

No one stopped me, so I kept walking. Out onto the sandy riding ring, which was covered with footprints both human and canine — coyote, maybe; domestic dog, more likely. The ducks startled away. I walked and walked, sneezing through fields of non-native yellow crown daisy, tripping over bouncy succulents. But I never felt at ease. I was alone in an unsafe city. I was breaking the law. I worried about the Belding’s savannah sparrow, nesting all around me in the pale green fingers of pickleweed.

And yet the Ballona Wetlands is still an enchanted, astonishing place, where nature persists on whatever terms civilization has allowed. I could see the adaptability Hanscom and van de Hoek so worshipped. But I also wanted trails, interpretative signs, a place to sit and think. What if I, and so many people who live nearby, could go for an evening walk in the reserve, counting the least terns and bufflehead ducks? How might that change life in our crowded and overdeveloped city?

I thought about what Shelley Luce had told me, that she considers it “a crime on the part of public agencies that, 10 years after the purchase, (Ballona) is not one iota more accessible.” I also thought about what Longcore said, that the wetlands’ fate isn’t a matter of public opinion; it’s a scientific call. “It is,” he says, “an ecological reserve.” And I thought it not so far-fetched that Ballona could be both an ecological reserve and a place the public could enjoy, with rules, and guidance. Designing for that would require a process that has been difficult to conduct around the Ballona Wetlands, ever since the rifts broke open around Playa Vista and the wetlands became a battleground. It would require open public meetings, leadership, stakeholders willing to hash out a compromise, and a steady stream of money for care and maintenance.

A constructive process could arise around the state’s environmental review when it comes out at the end of the year. Or it could be thwarted by more internecine acrimony in the lawsuits that will inevitably follow. Land manager Brody, at least, still has faith. “I look forward to the day when I meet all of these people out on the trail in the reserve,” he says. “It’s going to be a great place.”

Update: The original version of this story said that Roy van de Hoek girdled eucalyptus while a Bureau of Land Management employee; he actually did that two years after leaving his job with the agency.

Judith Lewis Mernit is a contributing editor at High Country News. She has also written for Sierra, Capital and Main, TakePart, The Atlantic and the Los Angeles Times. Follow @judlew

]]>No publisherCoastWaterPollutionCommunitiesCalifornia2015/05/11 04:10:00 GMT-6ArticleFamous Los Angeles puma holes up in residents' crawlspacehttps://www.hcn.org/articles/los-angeles-iconic-puma-visits-local-residents-home-1
The mountain lion brings attention to the role of urban wilds.On Monday night, Beth Pratt, California director for the National Wildlife Federation, took to Twitter with a passion. P-22, the iconic mountain lion that for the last three years has inhabited a large, urban Los Angeles park, had turned up in the crawlspace underneath someone’s house. Authorities were trying to dislodge him with tennis balls and sticks. “The tennis balls didn't work,” she wrote. “How about trying clearing out & giving him some quiet? This cat's been avoiding people for 3 years.” Even worse, a loud media throng had gathered around the home of Jason and Paula Archinaco, where the puma had holed up; Pratt pleaded with the reporters, too. “Media covering #P22 - thank u for the story but can we clear out the scene to give P22 a chance to leave safely?”

Eventually, Pratt got her wish: Marty Wall of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife "made the wisdom call," Pratt says, and established a perimeter around the Archinaco house, hoping the cat would feel safe enough to leave. By mid-morning Tuesday, Jeff Sikich, the National Park Service wildlife biologist who originally collared the lion, confirmed with telemetry that P-22 had headed out of the house and back into the park’s rural interior.

P-22 in Griffith Park, unhidden and caught by a camera trap. Courtesy National Park Service.

Pratt, however, kept tweeting. She didn’t dwell on authorities’ early mistakes, nor did she chide the media, as some other wildlife lovers did, for their ill-considered choice of words. (He’s not "stuck," someone pointed out, he’s hiding.) Instead, she seized upon all that was good about the incident — how P-22’s homestay had refocused the spotlight on his marvelous existence, how the city and community had come out not in fear, but out of genuine curiosity and concern. “Even the home owners,” Pratt says, “were superchill.”

A lot of people, myself included, were worried that P-22 would suffer the fate of the young cougar that curled up in an office courtyard near the coast three years ago and ended up being shot by police. But that would be unthinkable now, Pratt insists. “Everybody wanted the cat to be safe. He is L.A.’s lion! There may have been disagreement about how to get him to safety, but no one there wanted to kill him.”

P-22’s brief hideout has had another positive side for Pratt: It's given another boost to the “Save LA Cougars” campaign she began last year, inspired by a 2012 field trip with Sikich. (“I said, ‘Okay, this is my work for the next decade.’”) The campaign, a collaboration with the National Park Service, CalTrans and local conservation groups, is centered around the effort to build a wildlife overpass at Liberty Canyon, 40 miles west of Griffith Park but in the same range that bisects Los Angeles – the Santa Monica Mountains. The overpass would connect two large parcels of open space under the eight-lane 101 freeway in northwest Los Angeles County, and allow pumas – along with bobcats and raccoons and coyotes and skunks – to migrate out of the coastal Santa Monicas into wildlands to the north. Had P-22, who came out of those western Santa Monicas, had that option, he might be up in the Los Padres National Forest by now, hunting, mating and hiding out far from Hollywood Hills homes.

Pratt's campaign has raised $1 million of the $4 million needed to make the overpass project “shovel ready,” all of it within the last year. And in public relations terms, Save LA Cougars has been a blockbuster. Pratt gets standing-room only audiences for her talks at schools and corporations; hundreds of people show up at weekday rallies. People stop her in the street and ask about the tattoo she had done on her left upper arm, which depicts P-22’s face underneath the Hollywood sign. (“One woman in a business suit came up to me and asked, ‘Is he okay? I hear he had mange.’ ”)

“I’ve worked on conservation projects in Yosemite,” says Pratt, who lives about 30 minutes from the national park. “I worked in Yellowstone for four years. But I’ve never seen anything like the support around getting this crossing for urban cougars. And P-22 is what did it. It was his cat-footed journey across the freeways to get to Griffith Park that captivated people. It’s been L.A.’s redemption.”

Pratt, who got inked after meeting a couple of bison enthusiasts who’d done the same for their animal icon, now believes “urban wildlife is the future,” she says, the last hope for dwindling species. “Creating Yosemites doesn’t work anymore,” she said. “Creating refuges doesn’t work anymore. Animals need connectivity, they need room to grow.” P-22 is a symbol of that, she said, but at six years old, now nearing the end of his natural life, he’s “not a success story. He’s trapped there. He’s never going to have a mate.”

Still, on Monday night, P-22 once again demonstrated the survival skills necessary for a large carnivore to make his home in the urban wilds. “He picked a great couple in a great neighborhood” for his hiding place, Pratt says. “He really is one smart cat.”

Judith Lewis Mernit is a contributing editor of High Country News and is based in Southern California. Correction: An earlier version of this story named the National Wildlife Federation as the National Wildlife Foundation. HCN regrets this error.

]]>No publisherWildlifeCaliforniaU.S. Fish & Wildlife2015/04/16 07:50:00 GMT-6ArticleThe West in 72 hourshttps://www.hcn.org/issues/47.6/the-west-in-72-hours
Asian tourists look for space, spectacles and a decent bowl of noodles.Nguyen, 48, lives in Ho Chi Minh City with her husband, Tran Phuoc, and their 12-year-old daughter. Lithe and sophisticated, she had abundant black hair cut in layers and luminous bisque-colored skin, which she protected devoutly with a broad green scarf. She had come to the United States to visit her sister, who lives in Los Angeles, but also to see the West: Its low points and high points, its shimmering vistas and legendary infrastructure, its neon-blighted cities and unfathomable stretches of open space. Like me, she and her husband and child were traveling on a bus operated by San Francisco-based Lassen Tours, which caters to tourists from Asia. She had been assigned a seat next to me because she was among the few in our group who could speak a little English, and our buoyant guide, a 52-year-old Hong Kong native named Raymond Tse, suspected I was lonely.

I wasn’t, though. Not really. By the end of a third day among people whose cultures, food choices, languages and political landscapes differed radically from my own, I had learned to negotiate a certain place of vulnerability and belonging. People had begun to smile at me, with the grounding relief of recognition in their eyes; they held open doors, waved me along to walk with them. Language is just one of the many ways in which humans communicate, I thought, and not always necessary.

I did, however, have a headache. We had just left the Grand Canyon’s West Rim, on Hualapai Nation land, when it hit; I had told Nguyen about only because I needed to stop talking. The dry desert air, hatless hours in the sun and the dehydration that comes with the fear of infrequent bathroom breaks had all conspired to drive an imaginary knife into my right sinus cavity. So Nguyen let me fall silent, and went about her work. Finished with my ear, she moved on to my forehead, then to my head itself, making vigorous circles with her fingertips that pulled on my every fine hair. My eyes flooded with tears.

“I learned it from a book,” Nguyen said of her massage technique. She uses it on herself and her family whenever her city’s suffocating pollution makes them sick. When she finally let up, about 50 miles from Las Vegas, I felt weak, exhausted, emotional. But the headache was gone.

Li Qiang and Peng Lan watch a recording of the endless straight highway on Li’s phone as the bus makes its way toward Death Valley.

Brooke Warren

“You need to learn to do it yourself,” Nguyen counseled. “And this, too.” She grabbed my right hand, pressed her thumb hard in the space between my thumb and forefinger. I yelped. “Do it everyday. For your headache. For the pollution.” She took my other hand, yanked it toward her, pinched hard. I was cured.

I had taken Nguyen’s ministrations as more evidence that people on this trip felt at ease with me, but in truth Nguyen was almost as much of an anomaly as I was. We were both navigating language difficulties, both eating unfamiliar food. While our bus sometimes took on a couple from New Zealand or a family from India, the vast majority of Lassen’s clientele is Mandarin-speaking Chinese.

This is a recent phenomenon: Though China has been the fastest-growing tourism market in the world for a decade or more, Chinese tourism to the U.S. didn’t really take off until 2010, when Obama’s Commerce Department launched Brand USA, a marketing effort aimed at foreign visitors. Two years later, Obama streamlined the review process for Chinese tourist visas, and the results were dramatic: In 2010, more than 800,000 visitors came to the U.S. from China, 52 percent more than the year before. In 2014, more than 2 million came, making China the fifth-largest source of foreign visitors to the U.S., behind only Canada, Mexico, the U.K. and Japan.

A robust industry has grown up around them. I chose Lassen Tours for its bilingual guides; a couple of others I tried seemed to prefer Mandarin only. Hotels along tour routes deliver congee-and-dim-sum room-service breakfasts; retailers hire Mandarin-fluent staff. At tourist sights, Chinese passengers spill out of buses by the hundreds, relishing low-priced opportunities to cover a lot of ground at a breathtaking pace, without the complications of traffic or language.

I wanted to see what the West looked like to them, to experience anew the places I take for granted. I wanted to see how tourists from Asia adapt, in so little time, to a land that must seem as extraordinary as the moon.

Tourists walk along a salty pathway 282 feet below sea level at Badwater Basin in Death Valley National Park.

Brooke Warren

My journey had begun three days earlier, in San Jose, California, when I boarded Lassen Tours’ imposing luxury coach with a married couple from Shenzhen, China, Liu “Lili” Lei and her husband, Liu Lian Min. She was slight, prim and impeccably dressed, in black-and-pink two-toned ballet flats, a white blouse and a black-and-pink skirt. Her husband was equally trim, with salt-and-pepper hair and a handsome square jaw. A few moments earlier, when they walked up to the meeting spot in front of a restaurant in San Jose’s predominantly Asian North Valley, I had cloddishly asked, in English, whether they were waiting for the bus. Liu tittered and made fluttering gestures with her hands; I mimed a driver at a colossal steering wheel, commandeering what probably looked like a tank. “BUS?” I said again, following the American-tourist rule that if people don’t understand you, speak louder. She nodded her small head rapidly, and we laughed.

Click to view larger.

San Jose is just one of several cities from which Lassen collects travelers; when we boarded, the bus was already full of passengers who had loaded up in San Francisco, including the photographer I’d be working with, Brooke Warren. Lassen operates a daily web of intersecting routes originating on the West Coast and winding throughout the West. Some veer off to Disneyland; some go to Los Angeles, still others, in the summer, head north to Yosemite. Gams of tour buses form in fast-food parking lots to take on new passengers and let go of others. Tse ushered them on and off as if he were guiding ducklings across busy streets.

“If you go to Las Vegas, you are going to stay on my bus,” Tse said, articulating his words as if English were a tonal language, like Mandarin. “If you are going to L.A., then in the half day, about lunchtime, you will be on your bus. To L.A. OK?”

Tse, who came to San Francisco 30 years ago, wore smart sunglasses and a long-sleeved striped shirt over jeans, his short black hair combed neatly back. He entertained in two languages, Mandarin and English, although the latter had but a tiny audience: A family of three from India, Warren, and me. Nguyen’s family and a hip-looking couple from South Korea, Park Young-Gu, 40, and his wife, Zo Sun-Hwa, 39, understood Tse’s English little better than his Mandarin.

That never stopped Tse from ribbing Park and Zo, almost constantly, with stereotypes that would make a sensitive American blanch. “Kimchi! Hyundai! Samsung!” he would shout at them, explaining how Koreans and Chinese “all used to be one big family,” which is why Koreans can still read Chinese letters even if they don’t understand a word of Mandarin.

Tour guide Raymond Tse rattles off the itinerary for the day.

Brooke Warren

“Today we go to the factory outlet,” Tse announced from his perch at the front of the bus, microphone in hand. “The ladies will love it. Especially the Korean.” He stared directly at Park and Zo, seated near the front of the bus. “Korean, crazy shoppers! But first we stop for lunch. I don’t think we can find Korean barbecue, sorry. No kimchi!” I looked over warily at Park and Zo. They were in hysterics, and I came to see Tse’s razzing as a sign of affection. If without a common language, they could still nod and wink at their own comic assumptions, then they could all unite as Asian and be counted among Tse’s fold. Zo and Park delighted in his solicitousness.

Our bus would be traveling through the Central Valley to Barstow, California; then the next day to Death Valley to see the lowest spot in the contiguous 48 states at Badwater. On the third day, we would arrive in Las Vegas, where, for an additional fee, we could board one of two buses to the Grand Canyon — a four-hour trip to spend one hour at the South Rim, or a two-and-a-half hour drive to the Hualapai Nation’s West Rim where we’d stay for a luxurious four hours. All of it would happen in three days.

“We always try to provide as much of a program as we can in 12 hours, even if we have to skip a restroom stop and have no time for lunch,” said Tse, who used the pronoun “we” when speaking for both Americans and Chinese. “This is the way we prefer to do it. We don’t want to finish a national park in one day. We want to finish a national park in a half day, or one hour. You can look at the itinerary of our Grand Circle tour. In seven days, we see the Petrified Forest, the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, Arches National Park, Bryce Canyon, Zion National Park, Antelope Canyon, Lake Powell.”

“Okay, five days! It is impossible,” Tse said. “But the Asian market, that’s what they want. Up at 6 a.m., no breakfast. Rush, rush, rush. Then they come home and people say, ‘What did you see?’ They say, ‘I don’t know! I forgot!’

“That’s why,” he chuckled, “they take so many pictures.”

Lili Liu has her picture taken in Caesar’s Palace.

Brooke Warren

We crossed from the coast into Central California and headed down Interstate 5, past infinite groves of blooming almond trees. I looked back through the bus full of passengers; everyone was sleeping. As the scenery grew ever more dreary with monoculture orchards — grapes, olives, oranges, oranges, oranges — even Tse retreated to the back of the bus for a snooze. Later, crossing the soft green Tehachapi Mountains into the Mojave Desert, he perked up to narrate again: weather, geography, how deserts form in the rain shadows of mountains. He explained that space shuttles launched from the Mojave’s Edwards Air Force Base, “because the weather here is perfect, never raining.”

We got to the wind-scoured, dust-battered Mojave Desert city of Barstow at 5 p.m. as promised, to shop at the Tanger Outlet Mall. I rushed off the bus to find out which store would be the one all Chinese people love. Coach? Ralph Lauren? Ugg? To my disappointment, however, they didn’t crowd into one store. Instead, they dispersed, like a vapor, absorbed into the retail miasma that had settled over the desert. I sat outside on a bench, watching Marlar and his fellow bus drivers clean yellow bug splatter off their enormous windshields.

I had expected to report that people returned an hour later loaded up with bags of shoes, clothing and other items to be repatriated back to their country of manufacture. But they did not. A 20-year-old engineering student from Taiwan, Henry Lu — whom photographer and now collaborator, Warren, had unearthed from the crowd as a rare English speaker — bought a new pair of sunglasses. Lili Liu acquired a handbag from Coach. Most people returned to the bus early.

My bus mates’ frugality notwithstanding, Barstow, a cheerless city that exists where the old Route 66 and the railroads converge, has been carefully calibrated to the needs of the Chinese shopping tourist. The Ramada Inn smoothly processes tour bus arrivals and features a restaurant in the parking lot called, simply, China Town Buffet. When we first pulled up, the restaurant looked dark and deserted, but later it lumbered into action like a powerful, efficient feeding machine. The lights flickered on; steam coated the windows. Inside, two long lines of stainless steel chafing dishes were being loaded with food.

At the Sunglass Hut, where Henry Lu peers into the mirror, about 70 percent of paying customers arrive via Asian tour buses.

Brooke Warren

At the Tanger outlets in Barstow, California, tour bus riders and roadtrippers flock to buy items at stores like Claire’s and Coach.

Brooke Warren

Everyone arrived at once. We each paid $10 and got a plate on which to pile mussels, shrimp, green beans, pork dumplings, mixed vegetables, egg rolls, sesame balls, rice, and several kinds of noodles. Everyone joyously elbowed up to the dish they wanted, pushing without a hint of enmity. I had learned to pronounce the sounds dui-bu-qi; once when I blurted them out, Henry Lu’s mother turned around and beamed, “Excuse me!” But the phrase turned out to be mostly irrelevant; no one cared who shouldered whom aside to grab a serving spoon. We sat at long family-style tables and ate as one, washing it all down with tea or Coca-Cola or Tsing-Tao beer. Sometime in the middle of the meal, two young local women walked in, their hair dyed blond with streaks of pink and blue. They surveyed the scene for a few minutes from the doorway, turned away and left.

The next morning, I peered into the windows of China Town Buffet. It looked clean, unoccupied, inert, as if it had been conjured up the night before only to evaporate when its patrons moved on. As if only when another series of tour buses returns from the Tanger Outlet tomorrow night would it rise up, serve, and then vanish again, like a Mandarin Brigadoon.

Telescope Peak, at 11,000 feet the highest point of the Panamint Range, rises up to the west, covered with snow, as we descend into the Badwater Basin. It was hard to know if everyone was looking out the window to drink in the spectacular beauty of the painted mountains, or staring at the horizon in order not to vomit; the bus listed and floated down the mountain like a sailboat crossing rolling swells. A long white salt flat gleamed in the sun.

“Baaaaad-WATER!” Tse declared, counting the feet as we descended below sea level. “Two hundred ten, two hundred twenty.” He described the ocean that once filled this valley, told of temperature extremes in the summer that will kill you if you’re not careful. “But not today. Today nobody will die. Today we have only 65 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s 65 minus 32, which is 23; 23 divided by 9, which is 2.5; 2.5 times 5, which is craaaay-zee! OK, everybody, I don’t understand how America is still using Fahrenheit.”

He pointed to a sign on the bluff over the salt flats. “Sea level. See? That is the line. I went up last night, put that sign up there for you.

“This,” he says, “is Essential California.”

We pulled up behind three other tour buses along the road. We joined the scattering of visitors wandering out on the salt pan, reading the interpretative signs, taking pictures. People from our bus forced their cameras into my hands, pointing to themselves and each other, then pointing to me, miming a shutter squeeze. I nodded and smiled, focused their cameras and took their pictures, raising a finger before they dispersed to say, “Wait! One more.”

In the line for the pit-toilet bathroom, a tall Asian man dressed in jeans and a pressed Oxford shirt came up behind me and asked to go first: He’d been on another bus, holding it for an hour. When he emerged, he told me his name, Xu Cho, and said he was living in San Jose, working as a software engineer at Samsung. He had come to the U.S. 20 years ago, when he was 25, and had lived all over the West. He ended up on a Lassen tour because his sister, visiting from Shanghai, got fed up with him working during his family’s visit and booked a trip for herself, their parents and Xu’s wife without bothering to consult him. “I should have rented a car to drive them,” he said, “but my sister beat me to it.”

And yet he admitted there were advantages to the bus tour: You never have to worry about getting stranded in the desert with a broken-down car; no one micromanages your driving. His bus was spacious and not even close to full, and it was bringing him and his family to places where they rarely felt the crush of a crowd. China is beautiful, he told me; it has its own breathtaking views, high mountains and waterfalls. One-fifth of China’s territory remains uninhabited by humans, and China has its own national parks — 225 of them, to be exact. But “whenever there is a national holiday, every tour is full,” Xu said. “The trains, the cars, the airplanes, the hotels — everything is booked.

“You are not going out into nature at those places. You are going into the crowd.

“Here,” he said, “look!” He spread his arms wide. “So much room. It is hard to get to anyplace in China where you can go like this.”

“Not even the Great Wall?” I asked.

“Especially not the Great Wall.”

Korean tourists Zo Sun-Hwa and Park Young-Gu take a selfie at the salt flats in Death Valley National Park.

Brooke Warren

We arrived in Las Vegas on the eve of the Lunar New Year. City billboards beamed welcomes in Chinese lettering, gift shops touted special sales celebrating the Year of the Ram, or the Goat, or — if, like us, you’d just come from Death Valley — the Year of the Bighorn Sheep.

Vegas hotels have dedicated bus areas, with driveways to smooth cumbersome steering ratios and obviate the dangers of driving in reverse. Our hotel, the 4,000-room, Medieval-themed Excalibur, had a rotunda specially designed for large arrivals. Our keys appeared in an instant, and we filtered out like invading mice through the ding-ding-deeduly-ding-ing of slot machines and a haze of cigarette smoke wafting from strategically placed bars, to elevators that would lift us with the silky speed of pneumatic tubes to our precipitous rooms.

Those of us who had bought $25 tickets to a city tour assembled in the lobby at 4:30 p.m. to board the bus, which deposited us a few hotels away at Caesar’s Palace. We were a mish mash of travelers who had come on different buses from various locales; I recognized only Henry Lu and his parents from our original group. In the mob gathered at Caesar’s to watch an animatronic King Atlas dispatch his feuding children with a fire-breathing serpent, I met Nguyen Thi Ngoc Lien and her family, who had just arrived that day from Los Angeles. Together, we headed out onto the Strip: A pulsing, chattering juggernaut of humanity, impenetrable to flip-flopped bachelor partier and panhandling veteran alike. When two large white men in a pickup truck wanted to make a left turn through our fast-moving mass, they stooped low. “Ebola! Ebola! Ebola!” they shouted out the window. Our sea of people parted to let them through, less offended than stunned.

Elderly people, children, young adults, no one dallied or flagged. Tse had given out his cellphone number to rescue any strays, but as far as I know, no one used it. Everyone negotiated every move without incident. We walked and walked and walked. To the Mirage to see a simulated volcanic eruption, to the Bellagio to watch fountains dance to Frank Sinatra, to the Venetian, where a tall blond man who looked like a college basketball player directed, in faultless Mandarin, each person to a counter where, in exchange for their personal contact information, they were given a ceramic mug in the shape of a Venetian villa.

In the flicker of free time before loading up the bus to go to dinner, we lingered on the Venetian’s second-floor balcony, listening to a string quartet play traditional Chinese music. By the time I climbed up there, Warren was already ensconced in the crowd camera in hand. “People are starting to speak English to us,” she said, in a slightly amazed whisper, and introduced me to her new friend Sunflower Li, 40, from Guangzhou. Li had her hair cut in a tight bob, which framed big eyes and full lips, and she spoke with pronounced confidence. “The song they are playing is called ‘Two Butterflies Die for Love,’ ” Li explained. It tells the story of a boy butterfly who waits for a flower to open so he can declare his love for the girl butterfly inside it. When it does, he finds the girl butterfly, dead.

We followed Li and her young son and husband into the night, onto the bus, to the long strip mall that qualifies as Vegas’ Chinatown. Tse escorted us into a second-floor Chinese restaurant, but just as quickly showed us out: The wait for food was averaging 45 minutes. He herded us all downstairs to a Taiwanese restaurant instead, where the ordering process involved peering at dishes behind a plate-glass display and then sitting down to order.

David Sun, 14, stares at a free fountain show in Las Vegas, where hordes of spectators watched through phone screens as they recorded the spectacle.

Brooke Warren

Raymond Tse tells 10-year-old Leo Liu Jun to sit up straight while playing video games as they wait for the tour group to reconvene in the Venetian in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Brooke Warren

Warren and I were completely helpless here; Tse had to lead us like little children through the choices while Li ran interference with the wait staff. Finally, we were presented with a plate of pickled and steamed vegetables and a bowl of noodles to share. Tse thought we wouldn’t finish a whole bowl each, but after watching Li’s husband across the table slurping and biting off his noodles back into their broth, we realized we wanted our own. Li demanded a second. While a Chinese soap opera played on the overhead TV, all pink-and-green hues and histrionic gestures, and Li translated the story — “it’s about a robber, and he is pleading forgiveness” — we watched, imitated, slurped, bit and drank our respective meals down to their dregs.

Both Warren and I had lived in other countries, places where we had learned the languages and tried our best to blend in with the locals. But our Chinese friends were having none of that. It occurred to us both in the same moment that we were not observing a troupe of Chinese visitors in the West attempting to adapt to our culture. We were traveling on a mobile China as it moved through the American West. And the American West was expanding — with restaurants, shopping and spectacles — to include them.

In May of 2013, Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang launched a public harangue against badly behaved Chinese tourists. Enough with the loud talking, the nose-picking, the tagging of other country’s artifacts, he said. Chinese travelers need to straighten up. The following October, China’s National Tourism Administration published a 64-page Guidebook for Civilized Tourism. Among the advice: Wear a clean shirt, don’t greet people by asking where they’re going (as they do in China), and please don’t slurp your noodles.

Noodle-slurping — a practice I wholeheartedly support — aside, I observed none of the forbidden behavior on Wang’s list among my Chinese cohort. No rudeness, no slovenliness, no inappropriate shouting. I never heard a complaint nor heard of complaining; no one ever lost her temper, nor was anyone ever late. The people on my bus were unflaggingly cheerful, polite and generous; they evinced no cynicism about cheesy Vegas spectacles nor tedious landscapes nor California’s flagrant water squandering. Only once did I see anyone behave with textbook insensitivity, when, in the gift shop at the Old West-themed Hualapai Ranch on the Grand Canyon’s West Rim, a large man with a distinct Mandarin accent demanded to know if the young woman at the cash register was “a real Indian.” When she answered that she was in fact Mexican, the man persisted. “Who is a real Indian? I want to meet a real Indian!”

I followed the man out, hoping to get some insight into the nature of his inquiry, but I was waylaid by the chaps-clad jesters at the West Rim’s Cowboy Village, who grabbed me and threatened to throw me in their jail for wearing a striped shirt. (Now that, I thought, was rude.) But I suspected I already knew what he was after; Tse had talked about it on the bus. Ten thousand years ago, “during the glacier period,” as Tse put it, people from the distant Asian continent had trekked north to Siberia and crossed the iced-over Bering Straight to take up residence in North America. “The ones that stayed north, they are the ess-kee-MOH,” Tse said. The ones who moved on farther south, “those are the Native American Indians. Which you will meet today.”

McDonalds was one of the only restaurants the tour stopped at that did not serve Asian dishes.

Brooke Warren

Tse reported the Bering Land Bridge story as established fact, but in reality “Beringia” remains a theory, alternately proved and disproved whenever archaeologists dig up new remains and analyze ancient DNA. If such a migration did happen, most scholars agree, it wasn’t 10,000, but 40,000 to 12,500 years ago. Still, Tse said, many Asian people delight in the notion that Native Americans might be their relatives.

I thought this might explain why the clientele at the Hualapai Nation’s Grand Canyon West attractions is, by anecdotal estimates, 90 percent Chinese. A Native American tourist ambassador stationed at Eagle Point, Daniel Powskey, confirmed that Chinese visitors ask him a lot if he thinks the Chinese and Native Americans are related. He also told me he doesn’t particularly appreciate the question: “We have our own creation stories,” he said, “which say that we were put here at the beginning of the Earth.” He declined to tell me any of them because the February weather was spring-like, and the animals might hear.

Judging by the response to the story among my fellow bus travelers, however, Tse might have exaggerated the Beringia story’s appeal. Only Sunflower Li allowed that “it matters a little bit, as a story.” No one else seemed to care. I was confident, at any rate, that Beringia was not what brought Chinese tourists to this side of the Grand Canyon in droves. Nor was it the story of the late David Jin, the Chinese-born Las Vegas businessman who collaborated with the Hualapai Nation to develop the Skywalk, the glass-bottomed platform that protrudes 70 feet out over the 4,000-foot abyss. Most of the Asian visitors I observed were happy to save the $30 admission to the Skywalk and perch themselves, arms stretched wide, on rocks extending over the canyon, mimicking flight. They, like everyone on my bus, likely had one compelling reason for choosing the Hualapai Nation over the National Park Service’s South Rim: The tribe’s view of the Grand Canyon is a whole lot closer to Las Vegas.

And they came to the Grand Canyon, as Nguyen put it, to see “the power of water.” When we first arrived, I had boarded the small shuttle bus from the airport terminal to the Hualapai Ranch with Zo and Park, who sat quietly looking into the cellphones they used to help them interpret the sights. Nguyen had warned me that “Asians don’t show emotion,” but as we rounded the corner to the Hualapai Ranch and the Big Ditch came into view, both Koreans rushed to the window and cried out, Samsungs in hand. Seeing it through their eyes, I did the same. We celebrated together by positioning ourselves, two by two, at the window with the landscape behind us, taking smiling pictures of each other in pairs. We were never able to exchange more than a few fought-for words, but in that moment, we were friends.

Tourists take pictures with the piles of fruit for sale at Casa de Fruta in Pacheco Valley in Northern California, along State Route 152. The tour bus stopped at roadside tourist destinations, like Casa de Fruta, beyond listed stops at National Parks and cities on the itinerary.

Brooke Warren

Joshua trees in bloom floated by the bus window on the way back to Vegas, each creamy tip fitting each branch like a neat little cap. Nguyen’s husband, Tran Phuoc, asked me to write down the word for the plant on my notepad; then he looked it up in his handheld translating machine. “It’s a name?” he asked. I told him yes, and explained that the Mormon settlers thought the Joshua tree’s upturned limbs looked like a man praying, and so named the plant after the prophet.

I spoke clearly and slowly, never sure that he understood; the story comes so packed with bizarre details that making sense of it would take a month. Tran seemed satisfied enough, though. He handed me his business card, identifying him as the dean of a major engineering school in Ho Chi Minh City. “Come to visit us,” he said. Then he switched places with Nguyen so he could nap next to his daughter.

Nguyen’s English was halting and fragmented; our conversation felt like two people finding their way through a maze in the fog, feeling around for clues, heading down dead-ends for long minutes before realizing we’d taken a wrong turn. Still, it went fairly deep. We discussed her country’s environmental troubles, cultural differences in childbearing, even the war the U.S. fought on her home soil. Unlike the Chinese with their expedited visa rules, Vietnamese travelers endure long waits; Nguyen’s visa took two years, “because they thought I was going to come here to live with my sister.” Then they looked at her passport and saw that she had been to Malaysia, Singapore, China. “They saw I was a traveler, and they said OK.” But in all her travels she had never been anywhere, she said, where the horizon stretched out so unbroken.

“We have some open space, some parks,” she said. “But they are all very small. This,” she said, gesturing to the window and the miles of uninterrupted land beyond it, “it makes you feel different. So good. So much room.”

We parted in the Excalibur’s rotunda; I thanked her again for clearing my headache, and resolved to stay in touch. I caught up with Sunflower Li and her family as they were heading back to the elevators, looking tired and not at all interested in navigating a second language. I said goodbye to Tse, and thanked him for his help. Then I headed to the most American bar I could find, to have the most American of drinks: A rich, cold, hoppy beer. Then a few sips into my IPA at the MGM Grand’s TAP Sports Bar, it dawned on me what I was drinking: A brew the 19th-century British had formulated with preservative hops for export to India.

We live in a global village, I thought, and there is no way out. Nor, I realized, do I want there to be.

A Lassen Tours bus driver cleans his windshield after a day driving across California.

Brooke Warren

Judith Lewis Mernit is a contributing editor at High Country News. She has also written for Sierra, Capital and Main, TakePart, The Atlantic, and the Los Angeles Times. Follow @judlew

]]>No publisherTravelPeople & PlacesRecreationTravel Issue2015/04/13 02:05:00 GMT-6ArticleAn international street artist goes tagging in Joshua Treehttps://www.hcn.org/articles/mr-a-goes-to-joshua-tree-
The latest in a string of graffiti incidents in national parks.When Swedish-Portuguese street artist André Saraiva, a.k.a. Mr. Andre or Mr. A, left his personal signature on a rock in Joshua Tree National Park last month, he was not the first artist to deface what he should have left alone. Last October, 21-year-old Casey Nocket, allegedly decorated rocks in Yosemite, Grand Canyon and other national treasures, blithely posting her work on social media (again allegedly, as she has not been charged). In 2011, a teenage tagger who went by the name of “PeeWee” left his mark on Aztec petroglyphs in Nevada’s Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area. But it’s safe to say that Saraiva, who posted his work on Instgram, ranks high among the least contrite.

Photo of André Saraiva's tag in Joshua Tree National Park, courtesy of Modern Hiker

Nocket, according to her family, “knows she did a horrible thing and is incredibly remorseful.” PeeWee was brought up on federal charges and spent nine months in jail. But Saraiva hasn’t even apologized. Instead, he's gone on offense, ordering his lawyers to threaten legal action against Modern Hiker founder and editor Casey Schreiner, who called him out on his deed.

On Feburary 26, a reader alerted Schreiner to Saraiva’s Instagram post, which Schreiner thought looked suspiciously like Mr. A’s tag on a Joshua Tree rock. This is anathema to Schreiner, who has long been on graffiti patrol in the nation’s wild places; he also broke the story on Nocket’s alleged vandalism. So the next day he put up the image on the Modern Hiker website with an article, “Is Mr. Andre Tagging in Joshua Tree?”

Saraiva shot back on Instagram, protesting that the tag was “made with love” on private land. He asked Schreiner to take the image down. Schreiner asked only that Saraiva clarify the site’s location.

“It may seem like an extra step,” Schreiner wrote on Instagram, “but if this is truly on private property done with the owner's consent, mentioning that in your post would go a long way toward curbing common vandalism. A lot of our parks’ taggers look up to you and your fellow street artists.”

Schreiner spoke with authority: Outside of protected wildlands, he actually likes street art, and he’s somewhat of an aficionado. Living in Los Angeles for 13 years, he’s observed the fresh work of some of the best. “It’s not a popular position to take,” he admits, “but for Los Angeles some street art actually betters the environment.”

He would say that even of Mr. A’s tags. “There’s a couple about a mile from where I live,” Schreiner says. “They’re not as subversive as Banksy’s, or as interesting as Space Invader’s. But I like that they’re lighthearted and fun.” When he messaged Saraiva, he did it with respect. He simply wanted to know for sure where this new tag was done.

Saraiva, however, did not take it well. He refused to confirm the vandalized rock’s location, and then used Instagram to send out a seven-word string of obscenities, directed at Schreiner.

As it turns out, there was a reason why Saraiva wouldn’t clarify the location of his image: Schreiner and his hiker friends found the rock within the national park using Google Maps; another reader physically confirmed the tagged rock at the park’s Contact Mine trailhead. Schreiner updated the original post with the new information.

But the artist did not back down. On March 3, Schreiner received a letter from Saraiva’s lawyer, accusing Schreiner of “spreading detrimental and malicious information” in violation with both the French Civil Code (Saraiva lives in Paris) and U.S. privacy laws.

“Andre SARAIVA has realized at Joshua Tree National Park an ephemeral creation, consisting of putting on a rock his artistic signature in water-based paint,” the letter claimed. “(You) have seized Andre SARAIVA concept [sic] by ranting about this artistic expression in the excessive and outrageous way.”

Defamation in any country generally requires the circulation of false information, not facts documented by the complainant himself. But Schreiner still thought he needed a lawyer, and he found a couple in D.C. willing to represent him pro bono. They penned a detailed legal response, warning Saraiva’s lawyers that “Attempting to suppress truthful reporting through threats of litigation is unlikely to enhance your client’s reputation.” Schreiner posted both letters on Modern Hiker’s site Tuesday afternoon.

On Wednesday, Schreiner reported, Tami Roleff, Managing News Editor for the High Desert radio station KCDZ-FM, visited the rock and found the graffiti had been removed, and the rock “stripped clean of paint.” That's good, but Schreiner insists the tag's ephemerality was never the point. The example Saraiva set still lingers. “He does have a big fan following,” Schreiner says. “I’m concerned that people will think if Mr. A can do this, they can do it, too.”

In the meantime, for Schreiner, it’s back to wildflower reports, winter climbing stories and recs for post-hike meals. “The main purpose of (Modern Hiker) is just to get people outside enjoying nature,” he says. So let’s get back to it, then.

Judith is a contributing editor of High Country News. She is based in Southern California.

]]>No publisherNational Park ServiceArtRecreationPublic Lands2015/03/12 09:10:00 GMT-6ArticleLatest: New pesticide regulations for Oregon timber companieshttps://www.hcn.org/issues/47.4/latest-new-pesticide-regulations-for-oregon-timber-companies
Companies must now give officials at least a week’s notice before spraying. BACKSTORYIn recent years, timber companies have begun spraying herbicides from helicopters to kill competitive forest weeds (“Fallout,” HCN, 11/10/14). Some of those chemicals used, such as 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid — an ingredient in Agent Orange — have sickened nearby residents; some can even cause kidney failure. Oregon is alone among Western states in allowing aerial spraying near homes and schools with no advance warning.

FOLLOWUPOn Feb. 10, Oregon legislators proposed a law requiring timber companies to give officials at least a week’s notice before aerial pesticide spraying and to identify which chemicals they plan to use and where. The bill also directs the state’s Agriculture Department to establish no-spray residential buffer zones. “Oregon isn’t doing enough to protect the health of rural citizens from aerial herbicide sprays,” state Sen. Michael Dembrow told The Oregonian. “It’s time to change these outdated policies.”

]]>No publisherOregonPollutionU.S. Forest ServiceNorthwestForestsPublic healthLatest2015/03/02 05:05:00 GMT-6ArticleCalifornia's water future at a crossroadshttps://www.hcn.org/articles/the-other-nine
A state commission begins deliberations on how to spend $2.7B for water storage. Last fall, when California voters were about to go to the polls to weigh in on a complex proposition to improve the state’s water situation, some environmental groups balked. Though the bill, Proposition 1, to authorize the raising of $7.5 billion on the bond market, promised money for better parks, more wildlife habitat and the restoration of urbanized rivers (like maybe the one that runs through Los Angeles), it also set aside $2.7 billion for “water storage projects” that have a “public benefit.”

But it was never quite clear what those words meant. Would the $2.7 billion become seed money for two new dams on the state agricultural industry's wish list? Or would it go toward groundwater storage projects that keep water closer to home? The bill was written to be "tunnel neutral," meaning it wouldn't automatically pay for a pair of canals that Gov. Jerry Brown wants to build, to draw water from the Sacramento River and ostensibly reduce pumping from the ecologically stressed California Delta. But it wasn't "tunnel negative," either.

“It’s mystery meat,” Adam Scow, California director of the activist nonprofit group Food and Water Watch, said of that $2.7 billion pot. Nevertheless, with Brown's juggernaut of support lined up behind it, the water bill passed easily, with 67 percent of the vote. So now Prop 1's opponents have a new cause: Riding herd on the nine Governor-appointed members of the California Water Commission, the people who will decide how the money gets spent.

Shasta Dam: Will California use its new pot of money to build more like it?

Formed in 1913 to referee water-rights wars in the state, the California Water Commission now exists to advise the Department of Water Resources and supervise the State Water Project. In its current incarnation, it includes at least one bonafide environmental leader of a conservationist bent, Kim Delfino of Defenders of Wildlife, but also one passionate advocate for Central Valley farmers and their water rights, grower Joe Del Bosque, who last year got President Obama to visit his farm with a tweeted invitation. Also on the commission are a Silicon Valley contractor, an engineer, a water district manager, an educator and a consultant. Joseph Byrne, a Los Angeles attorney specializing in California environmental law, was appointed in 2010 and serves as its current chair.

The commission has just begun to deliberate on that $2.7 billion; much of their January 21 meeting was spent setting rules for that process. Members of the public who showed up to speak weighed in heavily on the conservationist side, warning against big water-storage projects that will exacerbate California’s already undeliverable promises to farmers. Such endeavors “have a long history of claimed environmental benefits that didn’t come to pass,” said Barry Nelson of Western Water Strategies, formerly of the NRDC. Tim Stroshane of the Environmental Water Caucus pushed for expanding the use of existing groundwater basins, such as the one in north Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley; “investing in them will lead to less demand for imported water,” he told the commission. “Real water reliability would result.”

The commission has a deadline to finish its Prop 1 work by the end of December of 2016, at which point — assuming they meet that deadline — California may have moved a tiny bit toward a more sustainable water system. Or the state will have continued farther along its current path, in which no storm, no matter how big, can make a dent in the current, grindingly persistent drought. Already agricultural interests are circling the wagons around their share, accusing Brown of reneging on his promises by allocating $532 million in Prop 1 funds for stream restoration, recycling projects, aquifer cleanup and other environmentally friendly ideas. Never mind that such projects were in the bill from the start — they are, after all, what got environmentalists on board — and don't cut into the water storage funds.

No doubt the water commissioners, too, will anger some segment of the state’s population, no matter what they decide "water storage" means for California's future. But they also have a chance to set the state on a course toward fewer crises, and hence fewer water conflicts. As Department of Water Resources director Mark Cowan said at the commission’s January meeting, the “new responsibilities that come with Prop 1 make these probably the most important years in the California Water Commission’s history.” The commission may not, as the Pacific Institute's chief water wonk Peter Gleick rightly argued last November, be able to solve all of California's problems with Prop 1 funds. But their work might just mark the start of asking the right questions.

Judith Lewis Mernit is a contributing editor of High Country News.

]]>No publisherWaterCaliforniaPoliticsDrought2015/02/11 16:30:00 GMT-6ArticleWhy are environmentalists mad at Jerry Brown?https://www.hcn.org/issues/47.2/why-are-environmentalists-mad-at-jerry-brown
The California governor has made bold moves on climate — but greens are disgruntled.

Gov. Jerry Brown displays a chart showing temperature increases due to climate change at an agricultural economics conference in 2014.

Rich Pedroncelli/AP Photo

Updated Feb. 3, 2015

On Jan. 5, when Edmund “Jerry” Brown, 76, was sworn in for his fourth term as governor of California, he delivered a treatise on the environment for the ages. He quoted biologist E.O. Wilson. He geeked out on microgrids. He leveled warnings about the climate and announced a plan of action. Within 15 years, Brown said, 50 percent of California’s energy should come from renewables; vehicles should use half as much gas. The energy efficiency of existing buildings should double.

The goals are California’s, but Brown clearly expects the world to follow his state’s lead. If we stand any chance of saving the planet, he said, California “must show the way.”

No governor has ever pledged what Brown has, nor have many spoken so fiercely on climate. So why didn’t Brown’s speech make environmentalists swoon? Beyond a few kind words from Tom Steyer, the billionaire Keystone XL fighter, most guardians- of public health and the planet came away no less pissed off than they were before. Outside the Capitol building during Brown’s speech, activists dressed as oil executives played mock tug-of-war with “the people of California,” yanking a suited man in a papier-mâché Jerry Brown head around like a puppet. It wasn’t clear who won.

Brown hasn’t talked about oil much lately, but early in his third term he made clear what he thought of people who put environmental concerns ahead of California’s then-sagging economy. In 2011, he fired two regulators for subjecting drillers to rigorous scrutiny; two years later, he announced that he wouldn’t be “jumping on any ideological bandwagons” to ban advanced well-stimulation techniques like hydrofracturing and acidizing, which entails dissolving rock with hydrofluoric acid. High-tech extraction techniques are critical to exploiting the Monterey shale, the 1,750 square-mile jumble of oil-packed rock that Brown called California’s “fabulous economic opportunity.” But most environmentalists just want drilling on the shale to stop.

“He could sign an executive order at any moment placing a moratorium on fracking,” says Kathryn Phillips, the director of the Sierra Club’s lobbying arm in Sacramento. “And in light of the information that we have out now, logic would suggest he do so.”

That information includes the 2-degree- Celsius global temperature increase some scientists consider the climate’s breaking point. Kassie Siegel, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s climate law center, notes that the governor mentioned that number in his speech, but didn’t seem to understand its implications. “We cannot observe that limit if we develop the Monterey shale,” Siegel says. “We just can’t.”

The good news for environmentalists is that Monterey won’t be the nation’s next Bakken: As the Energy Information Administration reported last May, there’s far less recoverable oil there than the 15 billion barrels industry analysts once ballyhooed. Brown signed a law in September of 2013 requiring drillers to disclose their methods, and also calling for studies of their environmental impact. With New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo throwing down an implicit gauntlet with his own state’s fracking ban, Brown might just consider some restraints on oil production when those impact reports come out this summer.-

Then will the rift mend? Unfortunately, it will not. Environmentalist dissatisfaction with Brown extends beyond the Monterey, and some objections come from former allies. As the state’s governor from 1975 to 1983, Brown signed into law protections for California’s coastal waters, pioneered tax credits for rooftop solar and set energy-efficiency standards so strict they obviated the need for a new nuclear power plant — a technology the governor and his then-girlfriend, Linda Ronstadt, rabidly opposed.

But that Jerry Brown is gone now, says Huey Johnson, who served as Brown’s resource secretary from 1976 to 1982. He’s been replaced by a distracted man with a worried eye on his legacy. “In his first two terms, (Brown would) give speeches on the importance of limits, on the limits of resources, the limits of consumption,” says Johnson, now president of the Resource Renewal Institute in Mill Valley, California. “He used to talk about preserving land for wildlife or recreation.”

These days, Johnson says, “He’s gotten hung up on this twin tunnel stuff. And for that, he deserves to be tarred and feathered.”

The tunnels Johnson refers to would divert water from the Sacramento River to thirsty farms and cities down south, ostensibly to reduce pumping from the ecologically hammered Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. They’ve become so synonymous with the state’s Bay Delta Conservation Plan, or BDCP, and so many environmentalists hate them, that in activist circles “BDCP,” says Phillips, stands for “Big Dumb Concrete Pipes.”

Phillips acknowledges that Brown is “weak on natural resource issues,” but disputes Johnson’s view that the septuagenarian statesman differs so radically from the 36-year-old idealist who eschewed the governor’s mansion for a downtown apartment because he wanted to walk to work. Like his father, Pat, who ran the state for two terms starting in 1959, “Brown has always been devoted to the idea that technology can solve all our problems,” she says. “The Browns like to ‘get shit done.’ ”

That’s not all bad, Phillips argues; it’s the very quality that “helped us transition so quickly to cleaner (electricity production) in this state.” It’s just that engineering marvels like dams, canals and high-speed rail often conflict with protecting habitat and open space.

Brown could, of course, leave an impressive- legacy on climate alone, if he’d only hold consistently to that goal. On Feb. 7, a coalition of environmental groups will hold a climate march in Oakland, Brown’s hometown, where he served as mayor for eight years, and participants apparently believe Brown is vulnerable to the pressure such a demonstration can bring.

“The standard slogan you see at these rallies,” Phillips says, “is ‘Climate Heroes Don’t Frack.’ I think the governor knows that. I think he understands that extreme extraction techniques to pull up oil will counteract all his other climate goals. I have hope that he’ll make the right decision.”

This story was originally titled "The limits of legacy" in the print edition.

]]>No publisherPoliticsCaliforniaClimate Change2015/02/02 05:05:00 GMT-6ArticleRegulators dampen hopes for tribal solar project https://www.hcn.org/articles/nevada-regulators-dampen-hopes-for-a-second-solar-project-on-tribal-land-1
The Moapa Solar Energy Center would have provided 175 megawatts to Nevada's largest utility.Hardly a better place to generate solar power exists on planet earth than the 71,000 acre Moapa River Reservation, 50 miles northeast of Las Vegas, Nevada. A wedge in the rainshadows of two small mountain ranges, the Moapa Valley enjoys, on average, 297 sunny days a year. That sun these days is a powerful resource, one the Moapa Band of Paiutes have just begun to exploit. “For us, solar power is an opportunity to combine stewardship of the land with economic development,” former tribal chairman Darren Daboda told me last year. “It fits into the holistic approach that we believe in — to minimize our impact and maximize our resources.”

In March, the Moapa, in collaboration with Tempe, Arizona developer First Solar, broke ground on the first major solar farm ever built on tribal lands, a 250-megawatt plant that, when it’s finished, will power roughly 110,000 homes for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Daboda and his crew have hoped it would be the start of a trend, and they've laid down plans for more solar farms, including one near the site of the 550-megawatt Reid Gardner coal plant, which for 50 years has spewed toxic air and ash over the tiny community’s homes and playgrounds. Last week, however, those plans were quashed, at least temporarily, when the Nevada Public Utilities Commission rejected, for the second time, a proposal by NV Energy — Reid Gardner’s owner and the state’s largest utility — to buy that plant’s power.

The reason, environmentalists who supported the plant say, is that regulators haven’t caught up with recent trends in the solar market, where the price of photovoltaic panels dropped more than 80 percent since 2008. “They still see it at it as a bad deal for ratepayers,” says Barbara Boyle, a senior representative with the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, which lobbied hard for the commission’s approval. “It’s a real problem, trying to get (utility commission) staff and consumer advocates up to speed on this, and to acknowledge the price of solar has changed.”

And not only that — during the same period that China's cheap solar panels were driving solar prices crazily downward, Nevada dramatically ramped up its clean-energy ambitions. In the spring of 2013, NV Energy announced a plan to close its coal-fired power plants by 2019; the following June, the Nevada legislature applied that same ethic to the entire state with Senate Bill 123, a law requiring utilities to retire almost all coal plants and replace them with cleaner generation. Reid Gardner's last turbine will spin down within two years.

Reid Gardner's closing notwithstanding, NV Energy doesn’t actually need the full $383 million, 175-megawatt RES Americas’ project to comply with the new law; the utility is a mere 54 megawatts shy of acquiring all its replacement power. But NV Energy spokeswoman Jennifer Schuricht says the Moapa Solar Energy Center had other merits. “It was shovel ready and would have provided hundreds of construction jobs,” she wrote in an email. It would also have produced power, she says, at or below national average for solar generation.

Boyle says it could even have competed well against natural gas. “Natural gas has a fuel price,” she says, “and there’s no guarantee it’s going to stay low.”

The Moapa project might also, in a less quantifiable way, repair the relationship between the utility and the people who suffered so long downwind from its coal plant. But that’s rarely something utility commissions anywhere consider.

Instead, the commissioners turned down the Moapa project for one simple reason, says their spokesman, Peter Kostes: They wanted NV Energy to submit their plans to a competitive bidding process, as Nevada law requires. While certain projects can skirt around that process, in this case, the commissioners didn’t deem it in the public interest to do so. And without the data about relative job creation and economic benefits the bidding process would reveal, the commissioners couldn't justify their support.

Barbara Boyle thinks that insistence on bids was too “strict,” and worries that NV Energy will now back out now altogether — a rumor Schuricht would neither confirm nor deny. And she holds to her position: “Some at the (Nevada) Public Utilities Commission,” she says, “continue to be resistant to renewable energy.”

Kostes insists, however, that regulators would have treated any other project the same way. “The commissioners are adamant that they’re not precluding another solar project,” he says. “They just want more information.”

Judith Lewis Mernit is acontributing editor of High Country News. She tweets @judlew.

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustrySolar EnergyRenewable EnergyNevadaTribesCalifornia2014/12/23 05:05:00 GMT-6ArticleWill California's Proposition 1 give rise to more dams?https://www.hcn.org/articles/will-californias-proposition-1-give-rise-to-more-dams-1
While some environmental groups support the water bond on Tuesday's ballot, some call it "mystery meat."Proposition 1, the $7.5 billion water bond on the California ballot next Tuesday, could provide millions of dollars for projects everyone likes. It sets aside funds to strip pollutants from valuable urban aquifers; it will bring in money to repair aging pipes that leach pollutants into drinking water. And the Salton Sea and the Los Angeles River could get part of the $500 million the measure authorizes for restoring damaged ecosystems. A recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California shows 58 percent of the state's voters will go for it.

So what about it makes many environmental groups so mad? The Center for Biological Diversity, Food and Water Watch and San Francisco Baykeeper have all taken an explicit stand against Proposition 1, as has virtually every fisherman’s advocacy group in the state. The Sierra Club, though it officially opposed the legislative bill that produced the ballot measure, remains neutral in theory, but the group's position statement announcing neutrality also uses the word hate.

Chelsea Tu, staff attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, says the problem comes down to this: While the bond measure does indeed give a nod to higher environmental concerns, “those beneficial provisions are far outweighed by the $2.7 billion in the bill set aside for surface and groundwater storage provisions.” In other words, the "public benefits" it funds could mean new dams: One would flood 14,000 acres in Colusa County north of Sacramento for the proposed Sites Reservoir; another would augment current San Joaquin River water storage at Temperance Flat. Prop. 1 funds could also go toward adding 18.5 feet to Shasta Dam — a $1.1 billion project touted as a “bargain” by Westlands Water District General Manager Tom Birmingham, but opposed by the Winnemem Wintu tribe, which was flooded out of sacred lands once when the dam was first built in 1945.

Proposition 1 never explicitly states that any of the $2.7 billion will fund dam projects, however, and not every environmental group worries quite so much. “The era of big dams is over,” pronounced Doug Obegi, staff attorney for the Natural Resource Defense Council, on the organization’s blog. “The water bond does not earmark funding for Temperance Flat or any other surface storage project.” Dams cost too much money to make sense anymore; even with taxpayer subsidies they “can’t compete economically with these regional and local water supply projects.”

Tu thinks that’s not only “optimistic,” but at odds with Gov. Jerry Brown’s oft-stated agenda. “Every time the Governor talks about the water crisis, he talks about building out water infrastructure projects that go back to the 1950s,” she says. “Those are projects that both state and federal legislatures have been pushing for many, many years.” They’re also projects that the state’s agricultural interests, which consume more than three-quarters of the state’s water, have lobbied hard for, along with a multibillion-dollar tunnel project that would suck water from the Sacramento River before it ever gets to the ailing California Delta. (Prop. 1 was written to be “tunnel neutral.”)

Adam Scow, California campaign director for Food and Water Watch, calls Prop. 1"a bunch of mystery meat," ominously geared toward finding more ways to deliver water to industrial agriculture. Even more alarming, he says, is that according to the provisions of the bill, the nine members of the California Water Commission have been tasked with allocating the meat. Those nine members have been appointed by "Big Agriculture's closest ally," Scow says. "A man named Jerry Brown."

Scow thinks Proposition 1’s other benefits recede in light of that fact. Aquifer cleanup, water for fish, habitat restoration and drinking water for disadvantaged communities are all good, he says, and even necessary. They just don’t have to be yoked to what he calls “a bloated bond deal,” written with industrial agriculture in mind.

“We do need to address the inequities in water rights we have in this state,” Scow says. “We just don’t need a bond deal to do it.”

Judith Lewis Mernit is a High Country News contributing editor. She tweets @judlew.

]]>No publisherWaterAgricultureCaliforniaPolitics2014/10/30 21:50:00 GMT-6ArticleRegulators release report on viability of nuclear waste storage at Yuccahttps://www.hcn.org/articles/yucca-mountain-is-still-dead
But it doesn't mean the Nevada site is safe — or even back on the docket.“Reid Blasts Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Approval Of Yucca Nuclear Waste Site,” blared a headline last week at Law360, a news site devoted to the legal profession, referring to Nevada's senior Senator, Harry. “NRC Deems Nuclear Waste Storage at Yucca Mountain Safe,” announced Power, an electrical industry trade magazine. Reps. Fred Upton, R-Mich., chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and John Shimkus, R-Ill., chair of the Environment and the Economy Subcommittee, issued a joint statement calling some recent news out of the federal agency that regulates nuclear power “game-changing.”

None of the ballyhoo was warranted, however; the proposed repository for spent nuclear-reactor fuel at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, 100 miles west of Las Vegas, remains in the same state it was in 2009, when President Obama, hewing to a campaign promise, ordered work at Yucca Mountain to stop. The project, which has cost taxpayers nearly $16 billion so far, has not been approved or declared safe; it has not been revived or resuscitated. It has not even been released from the decades-long purgatory it was born into in 1987, when Congress, rushing to finish up before the Christmas holiday, chose it as the sole potential site for high-level waste disposal, having no better reason than that the state of Nevada had so little political power. (The decision was forever after known as the “Screw Nevada Bill”).

Boring a hole in the tuff: The proposed nuclear waste facility at Yucca Mountain before the Obama administration stopped work on it in 2009. Photo courtesy of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission

What did happen is that, on October 16, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission published Volume 3 of a five-volume evaluation of the facility’s construction license application. It was not news, really, so much as policy in perpetual motion, like residual brain activity in a body whose heart has stopped. The Obama administration may have had the authority to silence the drills and end the spelunking tours of Yucca Mountain, but the courts in 2010 still denied the Energy Department's request to withdraw the license application, on the grounds that Congress stipulated the terms of the licensing process in the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, and only Congress can change that law.

Which means that the 17-volume, 8,600-page construction authorization license application that the Bush administration's Energy Department, managed to submit to the NRC — just under the wire in June 2008 — gets a full treatment by the Obama administration's regulators. Even if they have to proceed with a skeleton crew, funded at only a 10th of the agency’s ask, and untethered from any concrete, real-world goal. Volume 1 of the safety evaluation report came out in 2010, offering a general description of the project as laid out in the licensing application. The rest will come out next year.

“Publication of Volume 3,” reads the NRC’s statement, “does not signal whether the NRC might authorize construction of the repository.” High-level waste from commercial reactors will still remain in cooling pools and dry casks at the plants that produce it, a temporary fix that regulators have deemed adequate for now. What the 781-page document does, instead, is review the construction license application for a Yucca Mountain repository and determine whether the Energy Department’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management did a fair job evaluating its characteristics.

Did the authors of the license application, for instance, adequately consider the question “what can happen?” to the waste, taking into account geology, earthquakes and the potential corrosion of metal barriers that might allow radiation to escape? Did they consider the consequences if, 200,000 years from now, unsuspecting humanoids enter the facility and open a waste package? Did they account for “igneous disruption,” given that Yucca Mountain “lies in a region that has experienced sporadic volcanic activity in the last few million years?”

Yes, they did all of that, Volume 3 concludes. But its words could comfort no one in the thought that nuclear waste belongs in Yucca Mountain. Instead, it confirms what even many nuclear boosters admit: Yucca Mountain’s porous volcanic rock would need the significant reinforcement of engineered barriers to contain waste.

“Yucca Mountain is an oxidizing environment,” current NRC Chairman Allison Macfarlane, told me back in 2009, while she was still in the academic world to which she will soon return. “Spent nuclear fuel is not stable in the presence of water and oxygen.” That has not changed with the current NRC evaluation of the facility’s license application. It never, ever will.

Judith Lewis Mernit is a contributing editor at High Country News and is based in Southern California. Follow @judlew

President Obama among the mountains and smog. Photo courtesy of The City Project.

During my first winter in Los Angeles, the wet, wet year of 1991-1992, I set out on my daily commute east on Interstate 10 and beheld a vision I'd never expected: High, sparkling, snow-capped peaks towering over the city skyline. It’s not that I didn’t know these mountains, the San Gabriel Range, were there; I had read my John McPhee, knew his 1988 New Yorker essay, “Los Angeles Against the Mountains,” almost by heart. I just never expected to see those mountains framing the city in dawn-colored snow. The sight made me gasp, and I was seized with a compulsion to get up into them.

This past Friday, President Obama, using his authority under the 1906 Antiquities Act, came to the San Gabriel foothills to declare 346,000 acres within the San Gabriel Mountains a national monument. The announcement is not without controversy: Officials in some jurisdictions, such as San Bernardino County, demanded their segment of the mountain range excluded; residents of some mountain communities feared the monument would restrict their access to roads and resorts. They showed up at the president’s signing in San Dimas, claiming he’d overstepped his authority.

Most of metropolitan Los Angeles, however, sides with the monument. A recent poll showed 80 percent of residents backing the plan; among Latinos, approval was eight points higher. For all the lack of diversity in U.S. National Parks, the San Gabriels have long been the place where Latino families from park-poor foothill communities bring their children to camp, hike and toboggan in the winter snow. It’s also where Southern California goes to ski and snowboard: Mount Baldy, which rises above 10,000 feet just 45 minutes from downtown Los Angeles, features an impressive halfpipe.

And while the monument has been carefully drawn to skirt ski resorts and residential developments, hundreds of miles of hiking trails, campgrounds and wildlands will qualify for federal funding for improvements, as will the San Gabriel River, which drains out of a watershed that provides more than a third of the region’s fresh water.

It’s been nearly a quarter of a century since I first saw my new city half-ringed by the glittering San Gabriel range. I have walked to the top of most of its peaks: Strawberry, Telegraph and Mount Baden-Powell; Mount Wilson with its famous observatory and forest of antennae; Mount Lukens (the highest point in Los Angeles) and Throop on the Pacific Crest Trail. I have perched myself on rocky slopes to count bighorn sheep for the Forest Service; I have waited out blizzards in a collapsing tent and woken to an enchanted world of virgin snow. All within an hour of a city hardly anyone thinks of as teeming with wild nature.

And I know now why no one told me before about the snowy view from the freeway: The winter after I arrived, Southern California emerged from an epic five-year dry spell that had depleted the state’s reservoirs and turned the Central Valley to dust. No rain in the lowlands means no snow in the mountains, and during those years the San Gabriel River had nearly run dry. It was a drought that was soon forgotten when, by 1993, the reservoirs were full again and fire departments spent several winter storms rescuing people who’d been swept away in flood-control channels. Southern Californians have a way of denying the preeminence of hydrological cycles, geology, wildlife and weather that defines our lives whether we respect them or not. Perhaps with a monument in our backyards, we’ll pay better attention.

Judith Lewis Mernit is a contributing editor to High Country News. She is based in Southern California and tweets @judlew. Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that Mount Lukens is the highest point in Los Angeles County, when in fact it is only the highest within the city of Los Angeles.

]]>No publisherPublic LandsRecreationCaliforniaWildernessPolitics2014/10/13 09:00:00 GMT-6ArticleHas the Obama administration hobbled the Endangered Species Act?https://www.hcn.org/issues/46.17/has-the-obama-administration-hobbled-the-endangered-species-act
A new policy may set the law back half a century. On June 27, the two federal agencies that list endangered species — the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Services — published a 140-page policy document about the five-word phrase “significant portion of its range.” It purports to be the final word in a long battle over that phrase, a fight that has kept lawyers on both sides gainfully employed while giving conservationists migraines. It has the potential to upend U.S. policy on endangered and threatened species, leaving dozens of species unprotected by law in broad swaths of their historic ranges.

And hardly anyone noticed that it happened.

Hardly anyone, that is, outside of conservation biologists, wildlife managers and lawyers. Conservationists have long insisted that the phrase is clear on its face: A species that’s in jeopardy in a significant portion of its range — the flat-tailed horned lizard, for instance, in the Sonoran Desert — warrants protection simply on that basis. The inhabitants of that significant portion don’t have to be crucial to the global survival of the species; it’s enough that they’re disappearing from a place where they typically thrived.

Developers and industry representatives, on the other hand, argue the opposite: If you wipe out all the flat-tailed horned lizards in Arizona, but that same lizard nevertheless persists quite heartily in, say, Mexico, then the species should not be listed.

To conservationists’ dismay, the Obama administration has now opted for the latter argument. That’s no surprise: “We’ve been operating (with that interpretation) on a case-by-case basis for more than a decade,” says U.S. Fish and Wildlife spokesman Gavin Shire. “Now we have formalized our criteria in an official definition.”

And while the announcement flew under the general public’s radar, to conservationists it signals a major shift from the law’s manifest intent.

“It’s fundamentally at odds with what the Endangered Species Act was written for,” says Noah Greenwald, endangered species director for the Center for Biological Diversity, in Portland, Oregon. “The law wasn’t designed to make sure some specimen of a species in some postage-stamp area was preserved. It was designed to retain species in ecosystems that depend on them.”

Flat-tailed horned lizard.

Johnida Dockens, AGFD

The agency’s interpretation appears to be the same one struck down by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2001, in a battle over the aforementioned flat-tailed horned lizard. The lizard had been squeezed out of most of its range in the Sonoran Desert of California and Arizona; it hung on in a few isolated patches and refuges. But U.S. Fish and Wildlife declined to list it as endangered, so the nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife sued. The court didn’t totally side with Defenders, which had argued that the projected amount of lost habitat (over 80 percent) compelled the lizard’s listing. But neither did it buy then-Interior Secretary Gale Norton’s argument that “a species is in danger of extinction in ‘a significant portion of its range’ only if it is in danger of extinction everywhere.” For that to be true, the court said, “significant portion” and “all” would have to mean the same thing. And, of course, they don’t.

Shire explains (and the policy document verifies) a key difference between Norton’s argument and the current policy. Under Norton, a species that meets the listing criteria — meaning that its loss in a portion of its range puts the entire global population at risk — nonetheless merits protection only where it’s already in trouble. Under the current policy, such a species will be defended wherever it roams or grows. But Michael Paul Nelson, a professor and environmental ethicist at Oregon State University, says that’s missing the point: Congress included “significant portion of its range” in the 1973 act, he says, so that wildlife managers could get ahead of crises and act before an entire species teetered on the brink of extinction. Two earlier laws, the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966 and the Endangered Species Conservation Act of 1969, “were deemed inadequate,” he says, “in part because they only called for intervention when species were at risk of global extinction.” At that point, it was often too late.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Director Dan Ashe has pitched the policy clarification as a resource-saving move. “We’re looking at our very limited budgets and limited abilities and asking, ‘Where can that money be put to best use?’ ” Shire explains, adding that species — at least vertebrates — at risk in a limited area can also be listed under the “distinct population segment” amendment to the act in 1978.

But that’s an imperfect category, too: Until recently, the Canada lynx in the U.S. was considered “distinct” and protected in just 14 states; if a cat crossed the wrong state boundary, it lost its threatened status. (As of Oct. 14, the animal will be protected “where found.”) The northern Sonoran Desert population of the cactus ferruginous pygmy-owl, a tiny raptor that inhabits Southwestern desert scrub and mesquite woodlands, was listed as an endangered distinct population segment in 1997 — until developers sued and won on the grounds that the bird was doing fine in Mexico.

Noah Greenwald agrees that the pygmy-owl in the northern Sonoran Desert did not qualify as “distinct” from its brethren across the border. But the Center for Biological Diversity insisted that the bird was nonetheless imperiled in a “significant portion of its range.” Some agency scientists agreed, but in the end Fish and Wildlife said no. “They said even if (the pygmy-owl) were lost in the Sonoran Desert, the species as a whole would be OK,” Greenwald says, an interpretation based more on politics than science.

“The policy itself is a political decision to try and limit the scope of the ESA,” Greenwald says. “The pygmy-owl exemplifies that.” The organization will likely sue on its behalf.

Nelson, meanwhile, wants the public to realize how far one of the country’s landmark environmental laws has strayed from its 1973 intent. The Obama administration, Nelson says, has narrowed “significant” to mean “only preventing the complete extinction of a species, no more.” He adds, “I would guess that the citizens of the United States might have a very different answer.”

]]>No publisherWildlifePoliticsEndangered Species2014/10/13 03:05:00 GMT-6ArticleSolar in the desert finally gets some scrutinyhttps://www.hcn.org/articles/solar-in-the-desert-finally-gets-some-scrutiny
Interior Secretary Sally Jewell came to California's Mojave Desert this September to announce a multi-agency effort to boost renewable energy development in the desert. But first, she had to go on a hike.

“We went out into the Big Morongo Preserve,” she told reporters. “Fifteen, 20 minutes from here, there are wetlands. Wetlands, and 254 different bird species. Who knew?”

I remember being amazed, too, on a 2008 visit to that same preserve with a couple of California conservationists. I thought I knew the dry desert, its banded sunsets and varieties of lizards. But Morongo was a wonderland of seeps and birds, where a couple of times we stopped to behold a desert tortoise munching on purple flowers.

It was also a wonderland through which the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power had hoped to string a transmission corridor. The city planned to call it the Green Path North, as it would haul geothermal energy from the Salton Sea to the transmission hubs that serve Los Angeles.

That transmission line never happened. As with so many renewable energy projects slated for the Mojave and Colorado deserts of California, Green Path North mostly fell victim to market forces — but not before it sullied the utility’s reputation locally. The proposal had the effect of uniting off-roaders, rock climbers and conservationists in protest against the careless industrialization of the desert for energy projects – even clean-energy projects.

The new Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, a collaboration among federal, state and local governments, the solar industry, Native American tribal leaders and environmentalists, is an attempt to get ahead of such careless proposals. An analysis of 22.5 million acres of desert land, both public and private, it sets aside habitat for desert species like the tortoise and bighorn sheep. It should guide developers toward land rich with transmission, but absent cultural and natural resources.

Jewell called it a “road map” that can be used for more renewable energy development around the country. As she stood against a background of windmills just outside of Palm Springs, California, describing how the Obama administration means to “double down” on public-lands renewable energy development, the 8,000-page document went online.

So far, environmental groups have mostly praised the effort, as have Native American leaders and national park advocates. Kim Delfino, the California program director at Defenders of Wildlife, says she hopes it means that “we can focus on the projects we all can support.” The Sierra Club calls the plan “a promising step” toward protecting “areas with environmental, cultural, or scenic value that should be preserved for future generations.”

Energy developers, too, should be happy, as the plan promises to end the uncertainty that has wasted so much of their time and money. Two weeks before the plan’s release, for example, the California Energy Commission had belatedly approved the Palen Solar Power Plant, a collaboration between California-based BrightSource Energy and Spanish developer Abengoa. The commission had rejected the project last December, partially on the grounds that its peculiar technology — fields of mirrors that concentrate sunlight on a 750-foot high tower — would create hazards for birds in the Colorado Desert. A similar BrightSource solar plant on California’s border with Nevada seems to be creating an ecological “megatrap” that kills birds.

But in mid-September, the commission changed course: The project could go ahead, but at only half of its proposed size. Then, on Sept. 26, the developers suddenly withdrew their application. The delay had cost them a federal tax credit, and, quite possibly, their power purchase agreement with a major California utility.

The Palm Springs newspaper, TheDesert Sun, called the cancellation “shocking,” accurately summing up the general reaction to the announcement. But the real shock should not have been that Palen was canceled, but that the project was ever considered an appropriate idea for a place where it could do so much damage.

Will the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, which clears the way for 20,000 more megawatts of solar and wind on desert lands by 2040, prevent more ill-planned projects that stutter and fail? Everyone I talked to who’d come to hear Secretary Jewell speak said they were optimistic.

But a conservation plan is only as good as the people who make it happen on the ground. It’s worth remembering the lesson of the Green Path North: No energy project can be green without the support of the people who will have to live alongside it. And environmental ideals mean little if they aren’t backed up by genuine care for the local landscape.

Judith Lewis Mernit is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a column service of High Country News. She is a contributing editor for the magazine, and is based in California.

]]>No publisherWriters on the Range2014/10/09 04:00:00 GMT-6ArticleA plan for California desert conservation comes onlinehttps://www.hcn.org/articles/a-long-awaited-plan-for-california-desert-conservation-and-renewable-energy-planning-2
Will it stop more solar and wind projects from being built in the wrong places?Interior Secretary Sally Jewell came to California's Mojave Desert on Tuesday to announce the release of the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, a five-year, multi-agency effort to make the desert safe for renewable energy development. But first, she had to go on a hike. “We went out into the Big Morongo Preserve,” she told reporters later. “Fifteen, 20 minutes from here, there are wetlands. Wetlands. And 254 different bird species. Who knew?”

I remember being surprised, too, in 2008, on a visit to that same preserve with Joan Taylor of the Sierra Club and Ruth Rieman of the California Desert Coalition for a story in this magazine. I thought I knew the desert, its decomposed granite playgrounds and treacherous cholla, its banded skies and varieties of lizards. But Morongo was a wonderland of flowers and seeps and birds, where a couple of times we had to stop and behold a tortoise munching on magenta flowers. It was also a wonderland through which the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power had planned to string a transmission corridor, the Green Path North, to bring geothermal energy from the Salton Sea to the transmission hubs that serve Los Angeles.

That transmission line never happened. As with so many renewable energy projects slated for the Mojave and Colorado deserts of California, Green Path North fell victim to market forces. Many more, however, will get built. Jewell, standing against

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell announces the release of a new conservation plan for renewable energy in California.

a background of windmills just outside of Palm Springs, California, said the Obama administration means to “double down” on its renewable energy goals, which so far have led to 13 utility-scale renewable energy projects on public lands in the West.

The Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, an analysis of 22.5 million acres of desert land, public and private, is an attempt, at least, to make sure those projects don’t ruin places like the Morongo Preserve. A collaboration among federal, state and local governments, industry, environmentalists and local residents, the conservation plan has loomed among all those groups as a potential end to energy and conservation conflicts. It will set aside land for conservation and protect desert species like the tortoise and fringe-toed lizard. It will guide developers toward land rich with transmission but poor in cultural and natural resources and help them identify which places their projects could trample.

It will be, Jewell said, a “road map” that can be used for other renewable energy development plans around the country. As Jewell spoke, the 8,000-page document went online for the first time.

So far, environmental groups have mostly praised the effort. Kim Delfino, the California program director at Defenders of Wildlife, told me she at least believes that certain fought-over areas, such as the Silurian Valley near Death Valley, will be cordoned off for conservation, “so we can focus on the projects we all can support.” The Sierra Club calls the plan “a promising step,” toward protecting “areas with environmental, cultural, or scenic value that should be preserved for future generations.”

It also clears the way for 20,000 more megawatts of renewable energy to be built on desert lands by 2040. That’s 40 solar plants the size of Bright Source Energy’s Ivanpah Solar Generating Station on the California Nevada border, which has been frying birds at a disheartening rate. That many projects will require at least another 200,000 acres of land. The conservation plan’s “preferred alternative” designates more than 2 million acres on which to do it.

Two weeks before the plan came out, the California Energy Commission green-lighted a solar plant about an hour west of the wind turbines where Jewell spoke. The Palen Solar Power Plant, in the Colorado Desert, just outside Joshua Tree National Park, near the Arizona border, was conceived several years ago by the now-defunct German company Solar Millennium as a concentrating solar thermal plant where long troughs of ground mirrors would have focused the sun’s energy to produce electricity. To many, it wasn’t such a big deal.

“We didn’t even comment on it,” says Mark Butler, a former Joshua Tree National Park superintendent. “It really wasn’t an issue for the Park Service.”

Then Solar Millennium went bankrupt, and sold off its assets and projects to other developers. Palen made its way to Bright Source, which specializes in solar plants where large fields of mirrors focus sunlight on a tower that rises up to 750 feet high. The state energy commission last winter rejected the plan. There was concern about how the mirrors’ intense heat, which creates a phenomenon called solar flux, would affect birds flying so near to the Colorado River along the Pacific Flyway. At Ivanpah, the mirrors and three 500-foot towers seem to be creating an ecological “megatrap,” where heat and light attract insects, which attract birds, which lure even more wildlife into danger.

Palen promises to be a bigger concern, even if the Energy Commission, in a recent turn around on the project, cuts it in half. Its one tower will rise 750 feet, visible from Joshua Tree National Park. Would have the Desert Renewable Conservation Plan have stopped Palen, which is located in a Bureau of Land Management-approved Solar Energy Zone? If the plan had been done before land was chosen for projects like Palen and Ivanpah, would they be where they are?

Everyone who came to see Jewell speak expressed optimism, and everyone who spoke after her — including U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, and Congressman Raul Ruiz — jubilant and eloquent in his home district, the “magic and medicine” of the desert — did, too. In the meantime, however, many conservationists worry a disaster is unfolding at Palen that no newly hatched conservation plan can stop.

“If we want to do things ‘smart from the start,’” Barbara Boyle of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign told me, “we’ll stop and analyze what’s going on at Ivanpah. There’s an experiment going on out there, and we’re not done collecting data.” And no conservation plan, no matter how comprehensive and thoughtful, can substitute for that.